Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Draft prefaces for The Flowers Of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire

Allyson Dowling
Published on September 21, 2009 in The Journal.

Femme damnee

Preface

France is going through a vulgar phase. Paris, the heart and power of universal stupidity. In spite of Moliere and Beranger, one would never have thought that France would go so far in the name of Progress. -Questions of art, terrae incognitae. The great man is a fool.

My book may have done some good. This doesn’t cause me distress. It may have done harm. This doesn’t make me rejoice.

The aim of poetry. This book was not written for my wives, my daughters or my sisters.

I have been accused of all the crimes I am telling you about. Amusement of hatred and scorn. The elegiac is sentimental twaddle. Et verbum Caro factum est. – Yet the poet has no part to play in that. Otherwise, he would be a mere mortal.

The devil. Original sin. Virtuous man. If desired, you could be the Tyrant’s favourite; it is harder to love God than to believe in him. For the people of this century, however, it is harder to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone serves him and no one believes it. The Devil’s sublime subtlety.

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I’ll tell you the name of the greatest living poet

Jaki McCarrick
Published on September 17, 2009 in The Journal.

Census at Bethlehem

Carlo Izzo, in “The Poetry of W.H. Auden,” says that poets of a particular generation possess inevitable similarities. “It has always been like that: poets of a generation have a family air.”

Patrick Kavanagh was born three years before Auden, in 1904. Kavanagh can hardly be regarded as a bona fide member of the Auden Group, but he is certainly a satellite member of the modernising generation of English-language poets to which Auden belongs.

The ethos of The Bell editors, like Geoffrey Grigson at Faber in the UK, was to encourage work that reflected the true socio-economic picture of a resurgent Ireland: possibly “unpleasant; depressing; suggestive of a phase that other countries are sick of. There it is. We have to accept it.”

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From “The Sorochintsy Fair,” by Nikolay Gogol

Maria Elner
Published on September 11, 2009 in The Journal.

A Cossack Horse

Suddenly there was knocking at the front gate and the dogs started barking. Hivrya ran out hastily. She came back looking pale:

“Well, Afanasiy Ivanovich, we’ve been caught red-handed, there’s a crowd of people knocking at the gate and I think I heard my brother-in-law’s voice…”

The pastry the priest’s son was eating got stuck in his throat. His eyes started to bulge as though he saw some otherworldly creature.

“Get up there!” shouted the frightened Hivrya, pointing at the planks of wood that were fixed upon two beams under the ceiling. All the old rubbish was usually kept up there. Danger spurred on our hero. He thought for a minute then stood on the bench and carefully pulled himself up onto the planks; half-mad with fear, Hivrya ran to the gate, as the knocking became louder and more impatient.

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Is this regression? Or, Break-up break-down break-dance breakfast: mental notes, Or, A lounge in space 193

Justin Kidd
Published on September 7, 2009 in The Journal.

Space 193

Walking to work, forward, looking forward, never backward – I hear the sound of a girl approaching on a bicycle with poorly inflated tyres. It sounds like she is wearing black and has that nice light brown hair so common and yet so frequently dyed a more extraordinary shade. She passes and I realise I am right. She continues (apace). I never see her face.

At work, 8:15, an office, I call Marty.

“Could I start a religion?” I say.

“It’s too early,” he says, and hangs up. I would say Hello? and look at the telephone receiver, but I hear the tone. I do work; work so dull it is perfect. Perfect like a coma, but more useful. Daydreaming is infinitely better than dreaming. Dreams are the floor-sweepings of the brain.

Continue reading ‘Is this regression? Or, Break-up break-down break-dance breakfast: mental notes, Or, A lounge in space 193′