My contributor's copy of Rough Places Plain: Poems for the Mountain, edited by Margot Wizansky and published by Salt Marsh Pottery Press, arrived in the mail today. It's a beautiful little hardcover, second in an occasional series; my poem "The Drowned Men's Waltz" was published in the previous volume, Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House. This one contains "Dry Sea Dreams," one of two poems I wrote while in a plane over the Colorado Rockies in 2002. No one has ever published the other; it's reproduced below.
Paian
Ages of stone spine and scapulae, spilling
pine trees, crannied with snow: shadowed
by self, wind-whittled, crushing upward
into the clouds. Sliced by the centuries,
seamed, scarred; shouldering fir-thatched
soil aside. Mineral-ribbed, of granite
marrow: gouging the sky, toothing the earth.
I'm looking forward to this book. So far I have read only Maria Gould's "Snowbank" and Peter Gould's "Twilight Above Tree Line," but they are both luminous, lovely poems. And I get the reflected-light pleasure of seeing my name in the same table of contents as Denise Levertov, even if I know that it's only a reprint.
Tanz der Vampire has eaten my head. I suppose this is what vampires do, after all; I've been transcribing and translating lyrics since yesterday afternoon. I learned German originally through Schubert lieder and academic translations of Greek magical papyri. But I've never had much of a conversational vocabulary. I could read Rilke, but wouldn't have been able to get from the train station to my hotel. I'm not sure that this musical will improve my situation, either: but so far I know how to be pretentious about the scientific method in internally-rhyming couplets, nervously attempt to locate a professor in the middle of a Transylvanian winter, praise the digestive properties of garlic, and lament my consumption of Napoleonic pages and pretty pastors' daughters.* I'm sure there's a conversation to be had in here somewhere.
I'm also impressed in that normally I'd run like the plague from vampires who mull over their dark pasts—the only convincingly torn vampire in the history of entertainment, so far as I am concerned, is Nick Knight from Forever Knight; everything else is just sulking—but perhaps because Tanz der Vampire retains a satiric edge from its roots as a horror-comedy, I haven't so far been swamped by Teh Angst. Besides, I'll put up with a lot for good music. It's good music of the rock opera kind, as there's very little spoken dialogue that isn't at least underscored, and the electric guitar and sweeping hard-orchestral cascades have pride of place, but I'd take it over Andrew Lloyd Webber any day.** And there's no way I would ever have seen the show when it was running in Vienna, as from 1997 to 2000 I was in rather the wrong place in my life for major international jaunts, but I'm still sorry I never had the chance. Especially since Roman Polanski directed the original production. That's just another level of surreal.
Was ist das?
Blut, Liebling. Leck es ab.
. . . Gar nicht schlecht!
Awww.
*I can also translate Professor Abronsius' ecstatic "Bücher, Bücher!" and "Noch mehr Bücher!" off the top of my head, but it helps that he's just reading the titles in a well-stocked classical library . . .
**My internal soundtrack has been a mix between "Wahrheit" and "Die unstillbare Gier" for the last few days. Considering that one of these is a rapid-fire patter song and the other the aforementioned moody vampire ballad, and my German pronunciation is three years out of practice, I can't very well go around singing either; but that's what humming is for.
Paian
Ages of stone spine and scapulae, spilling
pine trees, crannied with snow: shadowed
by self, wind-whittled, crushing upward
into the clouds. Sliced by the centuries,
seamed, scarred; shouldering fir-thatched
soil aside. Mineral-ribbed, of granite
marrow: gouging the sky, toothing the earth.
I'm looking forward to this book. So far I have read only Maria Gould's "Snowbank" and Peter Gould's "Twilight Above Tree Line," but they are both luminous, lovely poems. And I get the reflected-light pleasure of seeing my name in the same table of contents as Denise Levertov, even if I know that it's only a reprint.
Tanz der Vampire has eaten my head. I suppose this is what vampires do, after all; I've been transcribing and translating lyrics since yesterday afternoon. I learned German originally through Schubert lieder and academic translations of Greek magical papyri. But I've never had much of a conversational vocabulary. I could read Rilke, but wouldn't have been able to get from the train station to my hotel. I'm not sure that this musical will improve my situation, either: but so far I know how to be pretentious about the scientific method in internally-rhyming couplets, nervously attempt to locate a professor in the middle of a Transylvanian winter, praise the digestive properties of garlic, and lament my consumption of Napoleonic pages and pretty pastors' daughters.* I'm sure there's a conversation to be had in here somewhere.
I'm also impressed in that normally I'd run like the plague from vampires who mull over their dark pasts—the only convincingly torn vampire in the history of entertainment, so far as I am concerned, is Nick Knight from Forever Knight; everything else is just sulking—but perhaps because Tanz der Vampire retains a satiric edge from its roots as a horror-comedy, I haven't so far been swamped by Teh Angst. Besides, I'll put up with a lot for good music. It's good music of the rock opera kind, as there's very little spoken dialogue that isn't at least underscored, and the electric guitar and sweeping hard-orchestral cascades have pride of place, but I'd take it over Andrew Lloyd Webber any day.** And there's no way I would ever have seen the show when it was running in Vienna, as from 1997 to 2000 I was in rather the wrong place in my life for major international jaunts, but I'm still sorry I never had the chance. Especially since Roman Polanski directed the original production. That's just another level of surreal.
Was ist das?
Blut, Liebling. Leck es ab.
. . . Gar nicht schlecht!
Awww.
*I can also translate Professor Abronsius' ecstatic "Bücher, Bücher!" and "Noch mehr Bücher!" off the top of my head, but it helps that he's just reading the titles in a well-stocked classical library . . .
**My internal soundtrack has been a mix between "Wahrheit" and "Die unstillbare Gier" for the last few days. Considering that one of these is a rapid-fire patter song and the other the aforementioned moody vampire ballad, and my German pronunciation is three years out of practice, I can't very well go around singing either; but that's what humming is for.
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