Dan Pagis, Bukovina, poetry

Dan Pagis

Bukovina, in the northeastern Carpathian Mountains, is one of those eastern European countries whose existence was fleeting--part of history's annexations and redrawn borders. Once sovereign, once part of Rumania, once part of the Ukraine, of Poland, of Russia. Paul Celan was born there.

Dan Pagis was too, which is why I mention it. I read Variable Directions, an anthology of Pagis' poems, not long after I started writing poetry, and fell into it. He  spent three years of his adolescence in a concentration camp (he escaped). Yet (yet?--what's the right conjunction for a segue from horror?) his sort-of airy touch was what made the owners of Open Books: a Poem Emporium in Seattle lead me to him. My poem Everyday I Write God a Letter by Way of Maintaining Connection and Lessening Rage includes this (this = Pagis and Open Books).

I think. I keep stopping to reread him and keep feeling consciousness layering on me, eiderdown on eiderdown, as if I were dropping to sleep down a spectrum of whites and luminescent, insisting turquoises, and aware of it.

I'm not sure what of his is in print right now but it's easy enough to get your independent bookstore to find used copies for you.  Here's the final poem in Variable Directions.

End of the Questionnaire

Housing conditions: number of galaxy and star,
number of grave.
Are you not alone or not.
What grass grows on top of you,
and from where (e.g., from your stomach, eyes, mouth, etc.).

You have the right to appeal.

In the blank space below, state
how long you have been awake and why you are surprised.

__________________
Dan Pagis, Variable Directions, tr. Stephen Mitchell, North Point Press, 1989.

A Celan Poem: exactitude and magnificence overshadowing

from bugguide.net

If you don't know of the poet Paul Celan I am most comfortable in directing you to Paul Celan: After the Disaster, an article in Spike magazine.

Celan's work is discussed in contexts of poetics (Modernism and its flaws; his leaps beyond), philosophy (Heidegger), betrayal (Heidegger), history (the Holocaust), genius (the poems and his translations).

When a poem is as efficient and spare as the following, any reaction seems a bit heavy-handed. Somewhere along the line I lost my collected poems (of Celan), so it's been a long time since I encountered this. My heart did that fake-heartstopping-thing when I read the second line ... the heavenleaf's web of veins.

Here in a ratty cubicle on the seventh floor of a midtown Manhattan office building, I was under that sky, saw it, knew it, knew empty time, the thought-beetle climbing.

I won't risk even that much about the couplet, except I'm in thrall to its exactitude and so magnificence overshadows (or shines out) the blood-bloom, the beetle, the feelers. Yes, yes, yes. The top of my head is missing.

RING–NARROWING DAY UNDER

Ring–narrowing Day under
the heavenleaf’s web of veins.
Across large cells of empty time, through
the rainfall, climbs
a black–blue thing: the
thought–beetle.

Words in blood-bloom
throng before his feelers.

Paul Celan (1920-1970); translated from the German by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov,
in Jubilat # 1 (Jubilat.org)