Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: April 13, 2011

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Castle Duino, Italy. Photo by Johann Jaritz

 

Elegy For a Lesser God…

 

There is a faint noise
In the mid­dle of a field
Beyond the sea line
Above the clash­ing rocks

No Scylla or Charybdis
Just nature clap­ping hard

For another beau­ti­ful wave

A faint noise in the cas­tle
And a flick­er­ing of candle’s light
Draws doves from their rest­ing place

Near the world’s sphere
The world’s globe

The navel of the uni­verse
As seen by the writer
Before he moves away
From the can­dle and the sea

What is in the mind
What brings the doves cir­cling
Overhead for a taste
Of bread and dreams?

It is not to sep­a­rate the ego
From the dove or the waves
Or set cas­tle walls against the world
As it is

Kinetic poetry con­nects
Art con­nects
Music con­nects
And the waves know it

 

 

by Douglas Pinson

 

 

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Posted on: February 19, 2009

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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke. 1910

 

Rilke’s one and only novel is a mys­te­ri­ous, beau­ti­fully writ­ten, baf­fling mod­ernist stew. Reading it for the third time, I was struck again by its yearn­ing and incom­plete­ness, its med­i­ta­tive and incan­ta­tory qual­i­ties, and the sense it gives us of lone­li­ness and despair, with­out remov­ing hope and the poten­tial for redemption.

The pro­tag­o­nist is a strug­gling young poet, liv­ing in Paris, poverty stricken, seem­ingly quite alone. He is nei­ther suc­cess­ful at his craft, nor com­pletely defeated. Rilke presents Malte in the present, lets him take us back in time into his child­hood, and also much fur­ther back, into the Middle Ages. This is done in a seem­ingly ran­dom fash­ion, but works. Fits. Amplifies what comes before and after.…

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Posted on: January 24, 2009

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Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. 1912

Below, we have a new essay by Robert Mueller. He deals with two fine poets, Barbara Guest and Jill Magi, with imag­i­na­tion and verve.

Jill Magi’s author’s page over at Shearsman Books can be found here. Jill’s home­page can be found here.

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The topic of poetic space on the page is an inter­est­ing one. How it looks alters our recep­tion and per­cep­tion. We read it dif­fer­ently to our­selves depend­ing upon topography.

Poetry is both spa­tial and aural. Traditionally, poetry was heard, not seen, passed down to us from bard to bard, from shaman to shaman, reg­is­ter­ing across the cen­turies in the ear, as we imag­ined the words and their ref­er­ents with our inner eye.…

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