Saturday 29 November 2008

Theodor Kramer's poem in an exhibition

A Poet-in-Residence translated poem follows. Theodor Kramer's original version is in German and is exhibited in the curiously titled Austria 1918-2008 Republic exhibition. A 2-part post about the exhibition can be found on P-i-R's parallel blog Bard on the Run.

The truth is that nobody has done anything to me

The truth is that nobody has done anything to me
For a long time I've not been able to write in the newspaper
And mother can still remain in the apartment
The truth is that nobody has done anything to me

The grocer cuts my slices of ham
And childishly thanks me when I pay
What else I will live on I cannot find out
The truth is that nobody has done anything to me

I travel as before on the trams
And walk unmolested through the streets
Although I don't know if I'm allowed to walk them
The truth is that nobody has done anything to me

On the trains there's no land open to me
I can't lift myself out of this place
Where I simply have no room to live
The truth is that nobody has done anything to me

13th July 1938.
Kramer, a Jew, was described by Thomas Mann as an important poet.
He fled from Austria in 1939 and lived for many years in England.

Theodor Kramer (1897-1958)

Thursday 27 November 2008

Pavel Haas, songs from Theresienstadt

These poems were translated from the original Chinese into the Czech language by Bohumil Mathesius (1888-1952). They were recently translated from Czech into German by Eva Profousova. And now, here they are, freshly translated from German into English by Poet-in-Residence who feels as if he is taking part in the children's game of Chinese whispers; by the end of the children's whispers (e.g. egg becomes peg becomes beg becomes bed and so on) the original word and meaning have been lost. So a word of caution; being three translations, and four languages, away from the original the new poems may no longer resemble the old.


I have heard the wild geese

Your homeland is there
far away
and you should go home,
straying heart!

In this foreign night,
in this autumn rain,
in the wind's sad moan
you feel the most pain.

I sit in my high house
and hear the cries
of the wild geese;
they are flying home again.


Far from home is the moon

Out of the dark sea
climbs the moon.
In foreign lands
it also shines.

Love protects
against senseless dreams
waiting
in the faraway evening.

Brightly the moon
outshines my sadness.

I put on my nightshirt
the dew is cold.

My hands, my arms
they are too weak,
to write about all that.

Sleep, send me in a dream
flying home over the rooftops.

Sleep, the dream never comes
the longing always shakes me awake.


Through the night

The bamboos shake in the wind
the moon sits on the stone.

Under the flickering Milky Way
flies the shadow of a wild duck.

I think of our next meeting,
the dream is behind my eyelids.

I sing with joy till the magpie's
chattering opens the day.


The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), a student of Leos Janacek, set these and other poems to music after he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt in 1941, following the Nazi occupation of his country. He was transferred to Auschwitz and was duly murdered on 17th October 1944, one day after his arrival. His opera 'The Charlatan' was first performed in his home town of Brno in 1938.

Tuesday 25 November 2008

haiku moments (2)

Ernest Hemingway often went for a walk in the morning before settling down to his writing. He believed that the exercise improved the blood circulation, cleared the head, got the brain working more efficiently.
Poet-in-Residence goes jogging in parks and woodlands. Last week there was a stone hidden in the autumn leaves to stumble over. Today there was a haiku waiting on the path:

cupid's arrow
on a bench
fresh fallen snow

Roger McGough's State of Poetry

Roger McGough's The State of Poetry is a splendid Pocket Penguin. It was published in 2005 as part of the Penguin 70 series to commemorate 70 years of Penguin books.
The State of Poetry contains 54 pages of short amusing poems a la McGough. At 1.50p. McGough's collection will cost you less than a Sunday newspaper. If you're a dedicated Financial Times reader you might save yourself millions.
The cover artwork is a delight to behold, with its neatly drawn map of The State of Poetry, showing the sea, the mountains and the roads; place names include Shakespeare's Range, Wordsworth Plateau, Mt Byron, Mt Blake, Betjeman Bay, Shelley, Point Hardy and there's even a small town called Anon.

Poet-in-Residence's favourite poem in the book is the following:

Hill of Beans

'Life ain't nuttin' but a hill o' beans,'
drawled Granma, and removing
her corncob pipe, spat a stream
of baccy juice into the empty firegrate
before settling back with a jug of bourbon
into her old rocking chair.

To think, only this time last year
she was working for the Welsh Water Authority.

----

George Orwell says: Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence.
Poet-in-Residence says: Penguin Books are splendid value for thirty bob.

----

haiku moments (1)

The poet speaks of the haiku moment. When such a moment is not set down it may become forgotten or distorted. This personal haiku series, starting today, is a notebook in which to record one poet's haiku moments.

memories
and postcards
curl and bleach

This morning the first haiku arrived:

ice rain
falls from tree
and mercury climbs

The haiku moments will probably arrive here in the manner of errant homing pigeons
~
as and when it pleases them.

Monday 24 November 2008

The Rake's Progress into the madhouse

Martin Kusej's soft porn version of Igor Stravinsky's ground-breaking opera (libretto: W H Auden and Chester Kallman), starring Toby Spence as Tom Rakewell, Alastair Miles as Nick Shadow, Adriana Kucerova as Anne Trulove, Anne Sofie von Otter as Türkenbab and Carole Wilson as Mother Goose, was performed last night at Vienna's Theater an der Wien.
Maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt, now well into his mid-70s (how much longer can he go on?) conjured a magical performance of Stravinsky's melodious and atmospheric music from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. It was one of those wonderful nights to remember. Everybody at the top of their game. And it all concluded with an euphoria of ecstacy when the clapping, whistling, cheering, bravoing, opera public rose to its feet as one.
It began with the young lovers Anne and Tom, a picture of boredom, idle on a mattress in a bare room containing not much more than a television and a remote control. The floor littered with beer cans and pizza boxes. When Rakewell's alter ego Shadow slipped out of a discarded pizza box to announce 'The progress of the rake begins' the audience suspected it might be in for something special.
Nick Shadow brought the news that Tom had suddenly come into a fortune upon the death of a distant relative. It was to be his downfall. Bank notes were soon littering the stage like worthless confetti.
The trail into degeneration and madness led from the pizza strewn bedroom, to the great orgy of lust in the bordello, to the mind numbing boredom of the luxury champagne and swimming pool life, to Tom's invention; a bread making machine that doesn't work (video of the bread and fish feeding of the 5,000), to the marriage to the celebrated bearded lady, to her supposed murder, to the auction of all her fish and fowl and to the auction of her body, now miraculously coming to life, to Tom's Adonis and Venus nightmare, and to his final descent into madness and death (New Year's Eve 2008 celebrations running on TV).
It was written in 1951 but it plays as if it was written only last week. The corruption, the risk-taking, the bankruptcy, the superifical lifestyles, the gambling (Tom plays for high stakes with the cards - his life); the eternal themes that are with us today. It could only have been written by a poet. The original Rake's Progress premiered in Vienna, the town where Auden lived at the time of his death, just round the corner from another opera house, the more conservative Vienna State Opera.
Today, Poet-in-Residence reflects that Stravinsky spoke with Dylan Thomas about the possibility of working together on an opera. But it was not to be. Before the project could get off the ground Thomas died of a cocaine and alcohol induced coma, cheered along the merry way, his own Rake's Progress, and cast aside by the mad Manhattan crowd too eager for kicks; his only hope, his own Nick Shadow, a 'Milton with a winking needle'.

Sunday 23 November 2008

Jelinek play to open in Munich

Elfriede Jelinek's new play Rechnitz is to open in Munich on 28th November in the Münchner Kammerspielen. It will explore the the events that took place outside the small Austrian town of Rechnitz, near the Hungarian border, on 24th March 1945.
Today, more than sixty years after the Nazi terror, a great many Austrians are still unable to look closely at their history. They push it away, they sidestep it, they change the subject, or they refuse point blank to talk about it. What they think about it is anybody's guess. And this is where Nobel Prize winning author Jelinek comes in. She's the door through which the world, and those Austrians who want to, and who have the courage to, can confront the nation's recent past, can look at it, and maybe can deal with it in some way.
It happened that a thousand Hungarian Jews from Köseg/Güns were brought by rail to Rechnitz. They were to be used as slave labour. On arrival some two hundred were found to be unfit for work. These two hundred were separated from the others and taken to a stone building normally used for storing the maize, pumpkins and other produce from the land. They awaited their fate. It wasn't long in coming.
Nearby at Batthyany Castle, as evening set in, Count and Countess Batthyany were greeting many local nobs who were arriving for an evening of partying. And indeed the party was soon in full swing. The guests included such celebrities as Franz Podezin, the NSDAP Group Leader and his followers; dependable, reliable, trustworthy types such as the Count's Estates' Manager and the local District Administrator.
Shortly after midnight several guests led by Franz Podezin equipped themselves with guns and a large quantity of ammunition made their way to the farm building where the two hundred elderly and infirm, the so-called 'unfit for work', were imprisoned. All but eighteen of them were shot dead. The eighteen who had been spared were detailed to dig a mass grave. Needless to say having buried their fellow prisoners they were duly executed.
In 1948 three men, Ludwig Groll, Josef Muralter and Eduard Nicka, were put on trial. They received terms of imprisonment. Podezin disappeared. It is believed that he made his way to South Africa. Of the two hundred murdered prisoners only eighteen have been found; the eighteen who were forced at gunpoint to dig the mass grave.
Today Rechnitz is a peaceful town at the foot of a wooded hill rising to 884 metres. It welcomes its visitors, who come to cycle, walk or ride their horses in the surrounding countryside. And there's the added attraction of the lake, an oasis where one can cool off on hot days. Here and there can be found shady wine taverns. There's a brass band and a choir; and there's even some traditional folk dancing in the way of entertainment.
The Rechnitz area, part of the Province of Burgenland, has a wonderful sunshine record. On warm summer days there is only one cloud; and nobody will say where it is.

Friday 21 November 2008

Man Booker winner Anne Enright on writing

The audience waited patiently in Vienna's Sigmund Freud Museum for the arrival of the star. When Anne Enright failed to arrive at the scheduled time a mini-panic set in. The publisher's man ran out into the street, ran back in, ran out again, ran back in again. Don't worry she hasn't cancelled, he assured. At the book table there were no original English versions of The Gathering, only German versions were on sale. The book, we were later told, had been translated into 33 languages.
Available free of charge was the latest Die Presse newspaper book news pull-out and in there was a photo of a smiling Anne Enright and an article about the Booker Prize book.
It's a story about a favourite brother who fills his pockets with stones and walks into the sea explained Die Presse. It's about the Hegarty family, typical Irish, lots of religion, many children, chaotic. The disfunctional Irish family, spread around the land, comes together on the death of Liam; and that is The Gathering.
When Enright arrived, 30 minutes late, with her entourage your correspondent was temporarily turfed off the comfortable settee under the photographs of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud so that the star could be photographed against a suitable backdrop. Enright turned out to be a smiley middle-aged woman dressed in a classic black number with a flash of white cleavage. She was clean, very white, smelled of soap. The camera flashed and the entourage moved on. The seat was reclaimed.
Impressions. The theme of the book is a kind of Christmas in Hell. Enright types at her desk, with music to match mood; she always leaves the computer on so that she can go to it and type in text. She tries to "write with rhythm like a poet".
On the radio this morning there's more: "It's a terrible way to work", "people can throw the book against the wall, I don't mind", "writers are interested in people when they fall apart".
At the event in answer to Poet-in-Residence's question: "The six weeks on the Booker shortlist were the happiest of my life."
Anne Enright is not a chronological animal. She's a writer who follows the threads, if only to cut them or to tie them in knots; she loops them back, forwards, in and out of time. It all fits to where we were. Freud, smiling on the wall, would doubtless applaud her.

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Booker winner in Vienna

Three items of news in connection with the Vienna Lesefestwoche Festival:
Booker Prize winner Anne Enright will read from her prize-winning novel The Gathering at Vienna's Sigmund Freud Museum tomorrow evening, Thursday 20th November at 7pm. The museum is situated in Dr. Freud's old surgery at Berggasse 10 (9th District). Burgtheater actress Sylvie Rohrer will read from the German translation. Admission is free.
Scotland's Gilbert Adair will discuss his new crime novel And Then There Was No One at the ORF Radio building in Argentinierstrße at 8pm on Saturday 22nd November. ORF's Paul Catty will read from the German translation. Entry €7. Two free tickets to this event can be won in a free draw.
There's also a chance to win a signed copy of 'Poet-in-Residence' Gwilym Williams's new book Genteel Messages. Send your e-mail/s (subject: Genteel Messages and/or Gilbert Adair) to office@viennalit.at before 8pm Thursday 20th November.

Monday 17 November 2008

Sacheverell's acrobatic parrot

The late Sacheverell Sitwell, 6th Baronet, was the brother of Osbert and Dame Edith. He didn't publish much poetry during his lifetime; and that is a great pity for it would appear that he had more than a modicum of bardic talent.
This fugato explores the fugacious world of bathchair admirals and senile dowagers; ancient characters trapped in stately English residences. The poem's swerving vocabulary and disequilibrium is quite magnificent. Peerless.

The Parrot

The parrot's voice snaps out -
No good to contradict -
What he says he'll say again:
Dry facts, like biscuits,-

His voice and vivid colours
Of his breast and wings
Are immemoriably old;
Old dowagers dressed in crimpe`d satin
Boxed in their rooms
Like specimens beneath a glass
Inviolate - and never changing,
Their memory of emotions dead;
The ardour of their summers
Sprayed like camphor
On their silken parasols
Entissued in a cupboard.

Reflective, but with never a new thought
The parrot sways upon his ivory perch -
Then gravely turns a somersault
Through rings nailed in the roof -
Much as the sun performs his antics
As he climbs the aerial bridge
We only see
Through crystal prisms in a falling rain.

----
Sacheverell Sitwell
(1897-1989)

Saturday 15 November 2008

Reflections in the window

Poem written on a journey from Olomuc to Brno, through the old lands of Bohemia and Moravia, in today's Czech Republic.

Reflections in the window

of reality. As

it was in that moment
when we were sitting opposite
in the carriage. Stopped in the mist
near Austerlitz. When
the other one suddenly moved.

It was us that silently moved.

And we laughed as we remembered
ourselves; and how we were fooled
once before.

Long ago.

Wednesday 12 November 2008

Albizzi's prolonged sonnet; a poem to end all war poems

Niccolo Degli Albizzi composed the following poem in the 13th century. The English translation is by the Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).
Millions of young men who rushed in patriotic waves 'to do their bit' in the great European adventure on the slaughter fields of Belgium and France had not read it. What many of them had read, and many times on English railway station platforms and barber shop corners, was Kitchener's poster 'Your Country Needs You!' or in Austria and Germany 'Your Kaiser Needs You!'. The power of propoganda is immense.

Prolonged Sonnet:
When the troops were returning from Milan


If you could see, fair brother, how dead beat
The fellows look who come through Rome today,-
Black yellow smoke-dried visages,- you'd say
They thought their haste at going all too fleet.
Their empty victual-waggons up the street
Over the bridge dreadfully sound and sway;
Their eyes as hang'd men's, turning the wrong way;
And nothing on their backs, or heads, or feet.
One sees the ribs and all the skeletons
Of their gaunt horses; and a sorry sight
Are the torn saddles, cramm'd with straw and stones.
They are ashamed, and march throughout the night;
Stumbling, for hunger, on their marrowbones;
Like barrels rolling, jolting, in this plight.
Their arms all gone, not even their swords are saved;
And each as silent as a man being shaved.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

11/11/1918 - the day the shooting stopped

Poet-in-Residence is marking Armistice Day with a few words of his own. Modern war technology is a technical business. And today's war is a fast moving business. The Breaking News ticker must be constantly fed. That's another business. Artillery today is a whole new catalogue of funny business. The role of the soldier is rapidly changing. His main business is sitting around and mopping up.

bringing contradictory elements into play, like

being in a corner
of a web of deceit and lies
and in the fragility of the everyday
war simulation

reality would overwhelm
the mindset

its computer animations
contain nothing new
outside the cross-hairs
imposed on the conflict laden images
and the garbled green chatter
and the sights and sounds
of the shock and awe machine
designed not to unsettle the sensory
apparatus of those watching at home

but only of those on the receiving end
of the latest cutting-edge project
-ile

controlled from the sanctity
of the distant oceans

meanwhile
those to be embedded
reporters and journalists will chatter
to the watching world
from 5-star upper storey hotel windows
looking into the night skies
ablaze with glo-green ufo-lights
arriving
at alien angles
from where is the moon

Monday 10 November 2008

Remembering Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten is without doubt the most famous British composer of the 20th century. His music is always full of feeling. It is presented in imaginative ways and often adorned with strangely wonderful rhythms and melodies. His music will often include mysterious religious elements: War Requiem, The Prodigal Son and Curlew River. Under the influence of W H Auden, Britten composed Our Hunting Fathers and Ballad of Heroes.
In 1939 after the outbreak of World War II Benjamin Britten and his friend Peter Pears followed Auden to America. There Britten worked on the opera Peter Grimes. In 1948 having returned to England he founded the famous Aldeburgh Festival.
Yesterday evening, after a performance of Benjamin Britten's Illuminations, poems written by Rimbaud in London around 1874, superbly performed by the young tenor Daniel Johannsen and the Vienna Chamber Philharmonic I began thinking about death; or more exactly about the significance of the message to be found in the architecture of graves. As in life so in death, seems to be the motto.
I have visited the Britten and Pears graves, two unadorned plain black stones planted in a row of similar stones, almost like rows of musical notes, on a sheet of grass behind an old church. I was most impressed by the simplicity and understatement of it all.
I have visited also a great monolithic chamber, a tomb of Napoleonic proportions in Vienna's Zentral Friedhof, containing the body of Dr. Karl Lueger, the most famous mayor of Vienna, and I have not been at all impressed. The logic of this kind of pomposity and eternal request for adoration defeats me. Or maybe there is no logic. C'est la Mort.
There's a quality in Britten's music that strips away the wallpapers of the mind and reveals what's really in the old brainbox. And that must be important. Now finally Britten's message arrives. It is this. Time is not for wasting on pompous trivia. It's only a short distance to the other box, the one waiting with its open lid and blank name plate.

pompous tombs for inflated egos
are not the smooth dark stones
on the green grass patch

those inflated bodies and brains
will elaborate ornate pomposity

who knows he was somebody big
chooses gold paint and marble
announces his gold in the bank
his bank
the big house on the hill
his hill

the pompous
decays like the ironwork

ivy clad perch for the crow

as every rat knows

Saturday 8 November 2008

The amazing world of the Labyrinth Poets

In Cafe´ Kafka where the clock in the bar is permanently showing five-to-twelve Poet-in-Residence joined the Labyrinth Poets (link in sidebar). Over 60 people packed themselves into the small room. Late arrivals were forced to sit on the floor and stand in the corners. It all began with a pretty girl and a poem in Finnish; a poem about geese, birdsong and warm mud. Next, an enthusiastic Colorado poetess with an Obama t-shirt gave the audience her take on the financial crisis. A Maoist-style rapper then treated the room to his 'beat and loop'. A poetess from Bucharest stepped-up to read her untitled poems on 'rumours of revolution' 'green bananas' and 'standing in line' in both Rumanian and English. A man called Shakespeare read some stuff. Labyrinth's founder Peter Waugh wowed the audience with a poem without words, a 'sound' poem. A youth from the band 'The Merry Virgins' recited something about an umbrella and a bloodthirsty vampire in German. Someone with his own sound-effects produced a 'jazz poem'; a kind of howling to Malcolm X it seemed to be. There was some talk of a $100 bet, made 6 months ago, that Obama would win the US election. Felix Mendelssohn recited an haiku about the new President-elect. 'From memory,' he joked following in the wake of an Irish poet named McCartney; a man who had obviously kissed the Blarney Stone and had the wonderful ability to recall a drunken ode he had composed a few years ago on a midnight spree in the Austrian capital. The efficient Evelyn Holloway, ubiquitous with a clutch of papers and her busy pen, kept the evening's bardic business in perfect order; and even found a moment to recite a lovely poem about the Cornish town of St. Ives; but in Denglish a spicy Sprache that is a mulligatawny of English und Deutsch. It contained the lovely line 'I found God in my handbag'. It went on and on. After the midnight hour Poet-in-Residence bid fond farewells to his new bardic friends and hurried away into the night; and into the last tram.
Of course the above is only a small sample of what went on. It was all a crazy wonderful mixed-up directionless labyrinthian beer-flowing poetic and suitably Kafkaesque experience. And what's more, in this place of all places, the events of the Nazi Kristallnacht, 'the night of the broken windows' to coin the trite phrase of the time, exactly 90 years ago, were on this evening recalled; and recalled without the usual political footle and foozle, but with bare faced poetic integrity and power. A bardic night to remember. A great pleasure to have been there.

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Rudyard Kipling's Garden of Gethsemane

In a few days, on 11th November to be precise, it will be the 90th anniversary of the armistice ending the First World War. Many poems have been written about the bloody horrors of this Great War and of the rat and louse infested trenches; and several poems from the World War I poets have been featured from time to time on this blog.
Poet-in-Residence will mark the day by visiting the Poets Against War website (see sidebar link) and spending some quiet time reading and contemplating some of the 30,000 poems posted there by peace-seeking poets from all over the world. Some 20,000 of these Poets Against War poems have been delivered to the White House as a protest against George W Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq.
John Kipling, the son of Rudyard Kipling, was killed in the Battle of Loos on 27th September 1915. The following poem takes its title from the name of the garden at the foot of the west slope of the Mount of Olives where Judas Iscariot is said to have betrayed his good friend and mentor Jesus Christ.
Picardy, in the north of France, was in an area of heavy fighting and the deployment of gas for the first time in 1915 as a weapon. During this 'war to end all wars' as it was called some 9 million soldiers, or more correctly civilians in military uniform, were killed and more than 20 million were wounded.
In the poem the faraway voice of John Kipling is heard from beyond Picardy, from no less a place than Gethsemane, the ultimate place of betrayal. In truth millions of young men duly armed with messianic zeal 'Your Country Needs You!' on both sides were betrayed by the unbridled malfeasance of incompetent politicians, corrupt industrialists, greedy bankers, jingoistic newspaper editors and warmongers, and duly marched like cattle to the dehumanising and unimagined slaughter fields; the open graves waiting greedily between the trenches.

Gethsemane 1914-18

The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass - we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.

The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.

It didn't pass - it didn't pass -
It didn't pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane.

----
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)

Sunday 2 November 2008

Purple Patch Small Press Best of 2008 Award for Genteel Messages

Poet-in-Residence has today been informed that his collection of poetry Genteel Messages (ISBN 978-1-906357-17-7) has been awarded 1st place in the Purple Patch Small Press Awards for 2008 in the category Best Individual Collections.
Genteel Messages by Gwilym Williams was published in June 2008 by Poetry Monthly Press at 39, Cavendish Road, Long Eaton, Nottingham, NG10 4HY, England. It is available from the publisher for 5.25p. plus p&p (currently 1.00p in UK). Check the links to 'Poetry Monthly Press' and 'Purple Patch' in sidebar and/or the advertorial at the side of this page for details. Visit 'The Recusant' to read a review.

The winners:
Best UK Small Press Magazine of the Year
The Slab No. 3
UK Small Press Magazine Poet of the Year
Bobby Parker
Best Overseas Magazine
Freefall (Fall 2007 issue), USA
Best Individual Collection
Genteel Messages by Gwilym Williams (Poetry Monthly Press)
Best Anthology
Raise the Bones (Cat Scan Press)

Latest:
Full lists are 'at Tom Kelly (link in sidebar) and other websites'.
Friday 7th November 8.30pm PiR will be at Vienna's Cafe' Kafka poetry-mic with some Genteel Messages (€6.00 per copy)
ViennaLit (link in sidebar) request for 2 copies. These are in the post (3 Nov).