Showing posts with label Stan Brakahge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stan Brakahge. Show all posts
5.3.11

Old EZ

A sketch given to me by a friend and talented artist, Chuck Landvatter...


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"It certainly 'seems' like Ezra Pound is primarily involved with telling his mind; you know, he's telling what he thinks is good and what he thinks is bad, but I hear his song, and I heard it even when I was utterly baffled by a book that obviously had been given to me as a joke.  It wasn't just stubbornness, and I had certainly encountered other books that were tough and tougher to read than that; but after comprehending something of them I threw them out.  Here was one that the more I understood the more yield came to me.  So here became the great book for going over and over and over.  Now I would say that I can read six to ten, in some places twenty words in a row, which isn't very much still, but it's good progress in a life time's worth of reading.  I'm working on it.  I've got some of the major slogans that were to sustain me all of my life, prayers, like 'All that is is light.'  That is enough to return me to that kind of person Pound is who would know how important it is to say and give Erigena a translation-'All that is is light.'  It's so powerful in that context.  That's something of what I mean by meaning." 

- Stan Brakhage on Pound's The Cantos
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(Also be sure to check out Yoel Meranda's excellent recent post involving Pound as well...)
9.11.09

Sounds of Light


Louis Zukofsky, like Ronald Johnson (for whom Zukofsky was a vital influence), is a poet of unparalleled musicality, who was and still remains criminally under appreciated (at the very least relatively speaking).  One of his great achievements (of which are numerous, his Bottom: On Shakespeare is a stunning and confounding work of criticism unlike any I have or am likely to encounter), "A", is comprised of twenty-four movements and encompasses almost a half-century of his life.  It is a shame that "A" (again like Johnson’s ARK) is currently out of print.  The following is the eleventh movement ("A"-11), which is visually quoted in Brakhage’s own haunting song of grief, 23rd Psalm Branch.
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River that must turn full after I stop dying
Song, my song, raise grief to music
Light as my loves' though, the few sick
So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,
Sounds of light, stay in her keeping
And my son's face - this much for honor.


Freed by their praises who make honor dearer
Whose losses show them rich and you no poorer
Take care, song, that what stars' imprint you mirror
Grazed their tears; draw speech from their nature or
Love in you - faced with your outer stars - purer
Gold than tongues make without feeling
Art new, hurt old: revealing
The slackened bow as the stinging
Animal dies, thread gold stringing
The fingerboard pressed in my honor.


Honor, song, sang the blest is delight knowing
We overcome ills by love.  Hurt, song, nourish
Eyes, think most of whom you hurt.  For the flowing
River'   s poison where what rod blossoms. Flourish
By love's sweet lights and sing in them I flourish.
No, song, not any one power
May recall or forget, our
Love to see your love flows into

[page break]

Us.  If Venus lights, your words spin, to
Live our desires lead us to honor.


Graced, your heart in nothing less than in death, go -
I, dust - raise the great hem of the extended
World that nothing can leave; having had breath go
Face my son, say: 'If your father offended
You with mute wisdom, my words have not ended
His second paradise where
His love was in her eyes where
They turn, quick for you two - sick
Or gone cannot make music
You set less than all.  Honor


His voice in me, the river's turn that finds the
Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf
Lightning stem, stems bound to the branch that binds
                                                                                    the
Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind's music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: song sounding
The grace that comes from knowing
Things, her lover our own showing
Her love in all her honor.'

("A" by Louis Zukofsky, Joun Hopkins University Press)

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23rd Psalm Branch Pt. 2 (1966/78, Stan Brakhage)