DISSENTSPRING — New Poems by Eliot Cardinaux
by Eliot Cardinaux
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Artwork by Jeffrey Lipsky
“Demon of Thieves”
Mixed media on 3 x 3 ft. canvas
www.facebook.com/jliparts
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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Thanks to Pierre Joris for his encouragement, especially in elucidating and making Celan’s influence more explicit.
Thanks to Jeffrey Lipsky for allowing me to use his piece, and for his generosity, always, in sharing his work with others.
Thanks to Sean Ali, whose own paintings have cleared the gap between me and my work so effectively that you — and I, and we — can better inhabit it.
Thanks to Mary Fairbanks for her active participation in the continuing struggle that forced these words into perceptible form.
And to Jade Wollin, for an unwavering foundation of love, which finally allowed these poems to exist.
INTRODUCTION
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My last poetic endeavor, The Scaffold in the Rain, a collaboration with Sean Ali, used his paintings as a structure around which to hang my words. Watching them, reading, decay around his images — words that became the scaffold under which the work itself is felt to rise up — brought to mind the gothic steeple Osip Mandelstam described — in his manifesto “The Morning of Acmeism” — as stabbing the sky in outrage, because it is empty.
As Notre Dame burned this year in a Western uproar, a parallel silence was made clear in the face of otherness and its — by apparent comparison — seemingly quaint variety of suffering: the image of a Palestinian woman grieving, embracing and guarding an olive tree, whom settlers intended to uproot; or the astonishing number of species — not untold, but overwhelmingly unnoticed — gone extinct due to human consumption, waste, and neglect in the past half-century.
The speechless interruption of the existence of these — allowed-to-go-unspoken-for indifferently by human — beings — in contrast to the outcry afforded the Western cultural symbol of Christianity that is Notre Dame — was called to mind to me by Jerome Rothenberg’s poetic account of his visit to Treblinka — which he documented in his 1987 masterpiece Khurbn — an empty field with a few picnickers, in which the stones were rowed — in its own stark contrast to his experience of the tourists flooding Auschwitz during his visit there. It spoke of all that goes unspoken, unnoticed, and forgotten in dailyness.
To Paul Celan, poetry existed solely in relation to the time when it was written, rather than in general relation to a feeling of Time. This todayness — its Meridian, its dated-ness — Celan spoke of alongside another aspect of poetry: its essential darkness.
Mandelstam — whom Celan thought of as a brother, even though they never met — called for a greater love of the existence of a thing over the thing itself. It was the survival of the word toward which he sacrificed his own life; the continued existence of his poetry.
These poems do not attempt to recreate the poetic sentiments of these two great masters; rather, they pay homage to those interconnected poetics, by virtue of their todayness, situated as events.
These are my events, for better or worse. If a poem withstands the voice, I have succeeded. If one can pick up the flayed branch and examine it, after the way has been cleared by machete, then the poem has an afterlife. If there is a poise with which these words unfold, it is toward the unknowable: breakable, brittle, bare.
Eliot Cardinaux
05/31/2019
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CONTENTS
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1. Goya
2. After Celan I
3. After Celan II
4. After Celan III
5. After Celan IV
6. After Celan V
7. For Osip Mandelstam
8. Lightdeserted
9. Existence
10. Helenic
11. Unworlded
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DISSENTSPRING
New Poems by Eliot Cardinaux
GOYA
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The ladder sinks rung by rung
into thunder’s echo.
Flutes bite the silence.
The fang and the flower
ossify,
horse
falling off
the bone.
.
All animals
and their human souls
break into captivity.
.
The sun slowly covers the mask.
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AFTER CELAN
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I
.
See,
those knifecords —
.
a knot in the blood
overblown with margins
at that
.
enclosure —
wolfskinned.
.
Witness,
wisteria blowing
deep
.
into matter
and deeper.
.
II
.
Finch,
the lymph node swells
in the bark,
.
beneath it;
your translucent
hammertrunk,
it sleeps through the keyhole.
.
What the way,
hacks-through,
hacks-into,
the throat can give,
maybe weighs: this
branch.
.
III
.
Take these trimmings —
.
of whose shadow,
to whom
I belong,
.
round as a month
or a lunar
.
mouth’s-word —
at mouth’s-worth.
.
Horse-fetched
or Time-lent
still,
.
do they
flutter and bray?
.
IV
.
Lilac,
those soft
misty evenings
of decay
lent
your stole
a new scenting;
truth-rooted.
.
Paler than violets,
iris, the yolk-
stained hunger;
.
grounds in the morning
dew.
.
Does the round-empty day
not empty, also
the fading circus?
.
Who will inform,
.
return-
to-it
.
V
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Excess,
the torpor-outridden —
the more-than-
stupor,
outrid
of its other,
my unaware,
.
distranslated
melancholy
breadmaker.
.
Bloodsucking second
hand-darkened,
of the pleat-enfolding
matterstopped tongue,
begun to rewind;
its thoughts,
blurted.
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FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM
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Lightlid, you tenderly shed
what soft and flaring
black sunbeams
bled to become.
.
The Jessamine’s
five suns faded
translucent as wax,
.
or the pale noon sun
of elsewhere
embraced by brambles.
.
Those witness, the mourners
and those
who attended the vigil
.
unsafe in the light of candles
even the acme of a twisted smile
longs to embrace, but can’t unmake.
.
And the red glare of sacrifice
finally forever
begins to silence
.
those parched singers;
never in my life
have I heard such music.
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LIGHTDESERTED
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Forsythia, you first
danced winter in.
.
Now, they blow inactively
and fall, squabble through random
oblivion.
.
Room for you
to martyr them,
.
flop like a hatchling
in toward city lights to die.
.
Though we are bidden to you:
may your light flair blue.
..
EXISTENCE
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Tulip, those far-fetched eyes
reach out like a world in flame,
lip-tonguing your sorrowful
stems as an iris, under lids
begins to swell: the heart.
.
In you, the nightingale quivers
a fresh set of lines.
.
Like fish-pools barring
the procession of measurements,
tips of the clock-hands
multiply, inchworms on your silken
breath.
.
When you draw your first arrow
will you finally rule
the aorta forever?
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HELENIC
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May a horse who flares in on darkness
.
object to the stain
on your border with increase,
the sea that gave birth to your name
.
suggest your impossible
giftembrace.
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UNWORLDED
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Poppy, you hung from colors
the breath of language.
.
Pale string, pale thread,
such linen precursors;
your spider’s-doom.
.
My dream is always,
each rung for real.
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And the finally satisfied tick
drinks the blood of its maker,
ever-mercied, ever-said.
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RELATED WORKS
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Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan, transl. Pierre Joris
Paul Celan, The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials, transl. Pierre Joris
Paul Celan, Microliths, transl. Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics
Pierre Joris, The Irritation Ditch
Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999
Osip Mandelstam, Tristia, transl. Bruce McClelland
Osip Mandelstam, Complete Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, transl. Burton Raffel and Alla Burago.
Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, transl. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope
Clarence Brown, Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poetry, transl. W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown
Jerome Rothenberg, Khurbn & Other Poems
Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Reflections, Hannah Arendt, editor
Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes
Francisco Goya, Black Paintings
Miles Davis/Gil Evans, Sketches of Spain
Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Poetry, transl. W.S. Merwin
John Berger, About Looking
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All poetry by Eliot Cardinaux
All Rights Reserved
© 2019
Eliot Cardinaux 