October 23, 2007
Rilke Week at Chekhov’s Mistress
It’s time – we’re posting about Rainer Maria Rilke this week. I let this go for quite a while since I originally posted my “On Deck” invitations to post (what with babies coming, you know), but let’s see if anyone wants to talk about this man and his poetry. I don’t suppose Rilke is too controversial – either you love him or don’t know him. My entry into Rilke’s work was through Stephen Mitchell’s translation in Ahead of All Parting. The idea for doing some posting about Rilke came from an invitation to read M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son, which uses Rilke’s quietly odd life as its subject. That’s always a daunting task, using an historical figure in a novel, but using a great writer is even harder, raising the standards by which the novelist must meet. Cunningham seems up to it (I haven’t finished the book yet), so I invited him to post here too.
Let’s start with Jonah, who posted the following in the comments:
My favorite Rilke poem is The Panther. My professional background is engineering…Reading those poems made poetry tangible and interesting me. I always like Rilke’s deep observation and concrete language.
THE PANTHER
His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds nor more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,
that in the very smallest circle turns,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which stupefied a great will stands.
Only sometimes the curtain of the pupil
soundlessly parts –. Then an image enters,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs –
and in the heart ceases to be.
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Recent Comments
One of the reasons I publish online!
– L. Lee Lowe
on “Would He Do it Again?”
Last year Derrick Brown did living room readings. I don’t think anyone there had ever read his poetry; I had barely been introduced a few days before. http://vimeo.com/6013960
Compared to any staged, stacked or emceed poetry reading, well, it was kind of like learning you hadn’t ever had good sex.
Granted, he’s a more engaging poet than many, and he reads poems that should be read aloud, like they should sound. I still think that a lot of the intimacy would have been lost in any a more austere setting.
As a listener, it had a profound and searing impact; if I could speak for the non-poetry-reading kind, I’d say they could not help but connect with this living poetry that was funny and sad and sweet and took you somewhere.
– Emily
on “Would He Do it Again?”
Awesome! I always loved Sontag’s ‘Notes On Camp’. Lucid and concise.
http://e6n1.blogspot.com/
– Eeleen Lee
on “Not an Intellectual, but a Writer, a Reader, and a Dreamer”
