Genet
I've never made a secret of the fact that I've stolen everything from Jean Genet. And when I say "stolen" I mean that. About 10 years ago I read some of his books and filled an entire notebook of quotes which I then pretty mucy used to write "Dear Ra" (published just this year by Starcherone Books), changing the specifics of course. That exercise really routed my brain, so that when I wrote the poems that went into A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, I did it without thinking about it. Anyway, I'm trying to reload after many months of work work work by re-reading and reading a lot of Genet.
[Actually now that I think about perhaps just as influential was the time in 8th or 9th grade when my brother and I went to the Guthrie's absolutely brilliant performance of The Screens, complete with big-shoed colonial soldiers and a main character who convulses/sutters through the entire performance.]
Here is a great quote from the beginning of Funeral Rites:
"I still love him. Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man's love for an adolescent boy. The delicacy of his face and the elegance of his body have crept over me like Leprosy. Here is a description of him...."
Here's one from the beginning of Our Lady of Flowers:
"These murderers, now dead, have nevertheless reached me, and whenever one of these luminaries of affliction falls into my cell, my heart beats fast, my heart beats a loud tattoo, if the tattoo is the drum-call announcing the capitulation of a city."
[Translator: Bernard Frechtman]
[Actually now that I think about perhaps just as influential was the time in 8th or 9th grade when my brother and I went to the Guthrie's absolutely brilliant performance of The Screens, complete with big-shoed colonial soldiers and a main character who convulses/sutters through the entire performance.]
Here is a great quote from the beginning of Funeral Rites:
"I still love him. Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man's love for an adolescent boy. The delicacy of his face and the elegance of his body have crept over me like Leprosy. Here is a description of him...."
Here's one from the beginning of Our Lady of Flowers:
"These murderers, now dead, have nevertheless reached me, and whenever one of these luminaries of affliction falls into my cell, my heart beats fast, my heart beats a loud tattoo, if the tattoo is the drum-call announcing the capitulation of a city."
[Translator: Bernard Frechtman]
posted by Johannes at 7:26 AM
3 Comments:
The worst part is that you've passed it on! Our Lady of the Flowers is so amazing- and it's certainly found it's way into a lot of poems, especially that one early one I presented at UGA for the "conference." It was line the you quoted: "my heart beats a loud tattoo."
Good times, that 3800 class, no?
Yeah. Thief's Journal sort of blew my mind. The bit about imagining that the most despised street person he can find is his mother, and adoring her, is sort of the key to the whole thing for me, inasmuch as a book like Thief's Journal has a key. He takes the most reviled, off-cast, abject things, and then adores them. And there's something sublime in that: a sort of "this thing is utterly rejected, but still here, and there's a glory in it being small and despised but undestroyed." In fact, the endurance of the small thing in the face of forces that would destroy it is kind of what Kant had in mind with one version of the sublime. I thought about writing an essay on this, but now that I've jabbered away in your comments section I probably don't have to. Yet another way the internet changes writing!
Yeah. Thief's Journal sort of blew my mind. The bit about imagining that the most despised street person he can find is his mother, and adoring her, is sort of the key to the whole thing for me, inasmuch as a book like Thief's Journal has a key. He takes the most reviled, off-cast, abject things, and then adores them. And there's something sublime in that: a sort of "this thing is utterly rejected, but still here, and there's a glory in it being small and despised but undestroyed." In fact, the endurance of the small thing in the face of forces that would destroy it is kind of what Kant had in mind with one version of the sublime. I thought about writing an essay on this, but now that I've jabbered away in your comments section I probably don't have to. Yet another way the internet changes writing!
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