Masks of Knowledge

I have breakfasted on ashes, the black

Dust that comes off newspapers, from the freshly printed columns.

When a coup makes no stain, and a tornado sticks to half a page.

And it seemed to me as though the Fates licked their lips

When war broke out in the sports section, reflected in the falling Dow.

I have breakfasted on ashes. My daily bread.

And Clio, as ever, keeps mum…. There, just as I folded them up,

The rustling pages sent a shiver down my spine.

That’s from from Oblivion City: A Review  by Helen Vendler from The New Republic Online  (Oct 30, 2008). It’s a review of the book, Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems by Durs Grünbein; poems translated from German by Michael Hofmann. Here is a bit of a poem followed by Vendler’s commentary:

Shivering under masks of knowledge,

Freaked out by the extraordinary,

Dreamless by day under cynical clocks,

Timetables, scales, counseled by

Cheerful killers, in front of the monitor–

It made you sarcastic.

By the end of the poem, the self has had its sight immedicably corrupted: “The backs of your eyes peopled by monsters.” (“Insects,” not monsters, in the German.) The insects, as actual beings, seem more frightening than monsters (out of legend). The despair in the ironist’s retrospect is felt in the shadow presence in the poem of the child he was, whose “sweet songs” antedated the sarcasm of the present.

Grünbein’s poems are not all so dark. This one is about writing poems (and it applies well to the making of photographs):

You pursue your own
eccentric designs you re-

fine the images you order
the moments but you don’t

listen to them
as quite differently in their own ways

they pursue their eccentric
designs refine

images show chance movements
move differently

in the same spaces and damned
if they’re going to listen to you. That

is the nub.

And, finally, this bit from the beginning of the review, because it made me laugh:

“Being a dog,” says a defining poem early in “Portrait of the Artist,” “is having to when you don’t want to, wanting to/When you can’t, and always somebody watching.”

The full title of the poem is actually “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog (Not Collie).”

The full review can be found either at Powell’s Books (with few sidebar ads) or at its source, The New Republic Online  (with lots of sidebar ads).

-Julie

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