ANIMALS FOR LIFE

traduced from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs Magnétiques, with help from Elizabeth Anglin

One day we found the remains of a building that had been a snake-pit or a monument to snakes. We didn’t cry. We didn’t care for the solar system.

The day we did cry the women who knew us offered us their love. There was only death to thank for all the hugs and food they gave us.

The reverse of everything was true then. No one knew what to say. If only we had been there when it happened we could have been spared.

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PERSUASIONS WE HAVE KNOWN: A REVIEW OF GEORGE STEINER'S GRAMMARS OF CREATION

What is on George Steiner’s mind? Exhibitionist memoirs. Slaughter in Eastern Europe. The Shoah. Electronic music. The Internet. Language. Heidegger. Creation. Shakespeare. Invention. Immortality. “At stake,” he writes near the end of Grammars of Creation, “is the fragility of the creative within us, the blighting ease with which we take leave of our creative selves.” Ominous sentences like this—and the book contains dozens of them—make me wonder, not only who Steiner’s “we” is, but whether he has taken leave of his senses.

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Failure as a Strategy

What fresh paths for us, what world all before us once again—
beyond these books and arguments that so engage us?
The cigarette in the movie tastes better than the four I smoked in imitation.

What charades the charades expose!
What protocols the protocols require!

Drugs did my growing up for me, some.
It was a farce, though, like my baptism,
I blacked out first in a stadium.
The face of ecstasy is always aging.

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A SUGGESTION FOR MAKING POETRY USEFUL

The fact that someone else writes poetry affects the person who finds it out. Of course, that person will then say that he or she once wrote, or would like to write, a poem, but is now or was then hindered by one of two things: not being good with words, or not being prone to deep feelings. The latter is less often admitted than the former, but some way is found to say it. The poet addressed must then discount deep feeling as a factor in the production of poems, and mark up the importance of having a way with words. But if the poet addressed has deep feelings and a way with words, he or she will be at a loss to supply encouragement.

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