1300
by Nina Ljeti

6 months and 13 days,
Threw my heart out the window
Cause the truth is scary,
The future even more, so
I Pick up a bottle-
Hello old friend-
Let’s take off to the moon.
It’s a place inhabited by
Beautiful men, music,
Cigarettes, French films,

Laughter, moaning, mumbling
Giggles of the idiots,
Insomniacs, and finite dimensions
Of conversation- your name, your age,
Your day, your sign- how are you?
I’m fine.
Baby, come with me,
To my crater on the north side of the moon.
I’ve got a rotating bed and a hot tub.
It feels good to be loved, no,
Desired- to have complete control.
I listen instead of speak, and no one asks me questions.
I find myself in front of mirrors, talking, philosophizing, kissing,
Making love
With imaginary man/men.
I see their faces, but I won’t say for
Fear I’ll jinx the possibility
Of true love.
Boy,
What a cliché.
A 20 year old mystery woman, she
Dances alone (if you see her call Craig) at
1-3-OOOOO Oh my god,
The Earth looks so beautiful from here,
So empty, so peaceful.
I could live there, when I retire.
I could live there when the party’s over.
I could live there with–I won’t jinx it,
For fear I’ll die alone.
I could live there when I remember
Where the hell I dropped my heart.
From a city window somewhere, long ago.
Don’t remember what city.
If you see it, call me.
It’s red, and small, and
I hope it’s still beating.

Stay tuned to Pas Un Autre every Sunday for a new poem Nina Ljeti.

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterized as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment. A new collection of Supervielle’s poems have been collected in a new book published by Bloodaxe Books entitled Homesick for the Earth. [Purchase here]

Eugenio Montale is universally recognized as having brought the great Italian lyric tradition that began with Dante into the twentieth century with unrivaled power and brilliance. Montale is a love poet whose deeply beautiful, individual work confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith with courage and subtlety; he has been widely translated into English and his work has influenced two generations of American and British poets. Jonathan Galassi’s versions of Montale’s major works—Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La bufera e altro—are the clearest and most convincing yet, and his extensive notes discuss in depth the sources and difficulties of this dense, allusive poetry. A new collection of poems by Montale, compiled for a new book, offers English-language readers uniquely informed and readable access to the work of one of the greatest of all modern poets. [purchase]

Guillaume Apollinaire – whose writings ranged from plays to experimental poetry, from art criticism to erotica – was at the heart of literary and artistic life in early 20th-century Paris. Both his work and his flamboyant personality had a defining influence on the development of Surrealism, Dadaism and other artistic movements. In late 1914 Apollinaire swapped the high life of avant-garde Paris for the mud and desolation of war in the trenches. But his poems of this period are wholly different from those that for English readers have come to define the genre of war poetry: exploding shells are compared to champagne bottles, and juxtaposed with the orgy of destruction are nostalgia for antiquity, impatience for the future, melancholy and exuberance. Apollinaire died in 1918. The new translations in this bilingual edition, entitled The Little Auto comprise mostly poems written after 1914, but include ‘Zone’ (in the first English version since Samuel Beckett’s to match the original’s use of rhyme) and some other pre-war poems. A century later, they remain as daring and alive as when they were written. [purchase]

Tomas Tranströmer’s new collection of poetry, entitled The Deleted World, is a short selection of haunting, meditative poems from the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tomas Tranströmer can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden’s most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open—exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable. [purchase]

Roman Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini, published by City Lights Books.  A much-appreciated gift from Dustin Lynn.

“Like A Cigarette Kissing Kerosene” – poetry by Shane Coffey

Nineteenth-century French poete maudits (accursed poets — poets who lived outside or rebelled against society), such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Comte de Lautreamont, have inspired numerous artists of various eras. An exhibition in Japan showcases etchings and prints of 20th-century artists, including Maurice Denis, Salvador Dali and Roberto Matta, who celebrated such French poetry. On view are around 180 works, including Matta’s interpretation of Rimbaud’s “Une Saison en Enfer” and a copy of de Lautreamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror,” which inspired print works by Bernard Buffet as well as illustrations by Dali. On view until August 7 at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, (042) 726-2771, 4-28-1 Haramachida, Machida-shi.

If you happen to be in New Delhi on Wednesday, the Russian Cultural Center of Science and Culture jointly with the Literary Club “Parichay Sahitya Parishad” is holding a literary evening dedicated to the birth anniversary of the 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.  ”She wrote with apparent simplicity and naturalness and her rhyming was classical compared to such radical contemporary writers as Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky.” June 23, 2011, 5:30 p.m RCSC, 24, Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi, India

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were stealing back Mexico for the people.  Freedom was being won with blood.  Mexico was in the throes of a revolution. The great first quarter of the twentieth century Mexico was fertile ground for not only revolutionaries, but also artists. Mexico was indeed succeeding to a modern world.  Mexico, always the symbol and champion of the underdog, the poor, the hungry has always held on strong to its icons.  They were roughhewn in their prismatic, threadbare ponchos, sombreros, and dark mestizo skin that glowed amber under a romantic, warm desert sun in a landscape of infinite flowers, cobble stone, and chirping monkeys. And like inventing memories from photographs, our images of Mexico have been always invented by this imagery.  It’s the murals of Diego Rivera, the gardens and portraits of Frida Kahlo and the poems of Octavio Paz that paint of landscape of a bygone Mexico – poorly preserved by kitsch, refrigerator magnates, and theme restaurants. We always wonder what happened to the good old days when they’re seemingly gone forever.  Certainly one of the most influential icons of Mexico’s good old days is the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whose work is being exhibited alongside the poetry of another symbol of Mexico’s heritage Octavio Paz, at the Mexican Embassy in India, captured the spirit of a Mexico experiencing the pangs of a revolution and the dialectic of an artistic movement mirroring back its angst. Screaming in a fulmination of dust, Bravo’s photographs are as  journalistic as they are erotic.  Bravo was born in 1902 to a  family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Diego Rivera.  Bravo, who was inspired by the burgeoning surrealist movement in France, starting taking pictures at 18 whilst working a government job.  Bravo would become a profoundly influential figure in contemporary Mexican and Latin American photography, but he would not become largely known in the rest of the world.   Bravo died in 2002 at the age of 100, but his photographs are a significant part of Mexico’s history.

An exhibition, entitled In the Light of Mexico, curated by Conrado Tostado Gutierrez, the cultural attaché of the Embassy of Mexico in Delhi, comprises a substantial body of images that evokes the era of the Mexican Revolution of early 1907 to 1911, the newly independent Mexico and its people. Bravo’s daughter Aurelia Alvarez Bravo and his widow Collette Urbajtel have painstakingly developed the original negatives from the photographer’s work to make this exhibition possible. Bravo’s photographs are coupled with the poems of poet and former Mexican Ambassador to India, Octavio Paz.

On view until June 30th in New Delhi, India. More info.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre