Paul Celan, from a poem titled "Afternoon with Circus and Citadel," featured in Selected Poems & Prose
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Paul Celan, Selections
[Text ID: Memory, / set up your flag at half-mast. / At half-mast / today and forever.]
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we gaze at each other, we speak of dark things,
we love each other like poppy and memory, we sleep like wine in the seashells, like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam.
Paul Celan
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Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it.
A poem, being an instance of language, hence, essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the — surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route; they are headed toward.
Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.
Paul Celan, from a speech given on the occasion of being awarded the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, sourced here
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Paul Celan, Psalm
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A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.
—Paul Celan, from “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” (1958), trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
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hello <3 could you please do a webweaving on losing someone you love? thank you!
Either way, you're not coming back.
For whatever reason, I really struggled with this one. I wasn't sure if you meant loss as in dying or loss as in leaving, so I tried to make it applicable to both.
tender is not a bad word, K.C Cramm | Planet of Love, Richard Siken | A Self-Portrait in Letters, Anne Sexton | Count the Almonds, Paul Celan | Come Over (Again), Crawlers | A Valentine That Can’t Be Sent, Rosmarie Waldrop | Poetic Regulations, Mahmoud Darwish | Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi | @/small-planets | The Torn-Up Road, Richard Siken | Instructions for the End, Jen Benka | Norwegian Woods, Haruki Murakami
[transcriptions and image ID in alt text]
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Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, from Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan; 24 June 1949
Text ID: I am full of impatience and love.
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Germany's Next Top-Gedicht: Erstes Halbfinale
link
VS
link
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THE WORLD IS GONE, I MUST CARRY YOU
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Richard Siken, ‘You are Jeff’
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Angelica Alzona, Creophagy
Mary Oliver, ‘West Wind’
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Jeffrey McDaniel, ‘Archipelago of Kisses’
Graham Dean, Couple
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
Paul Celan, ‘Vast, glowing vault’
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Paul Celan, from a poem titled "Below a Painting," featured in Selected Poems & Prose
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Helena Almeida, Dentro de Mim (2000)
Lo último que nos queda a los dos / algo de lenguaje / algo de destino
Paul Celan
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Real poems, Celan wrote, are “making toward something ... perhaps toward an addressable Thou.” I would argue that, for any poet writing toward such a subject, regular words and syntax soon become inadequate. Celan is an extreme case though, because he also had to contend with the inadequacy of the German language to express the experience of the Jewish poet, post-Holocaust. [...]
Celan’s mother’s language was German. This German-speaking mother, who makes fitful enigmatic appearances in his poems, was shot by Germans. [...]
Celan chose to protest from inside German, in “death-rattling,” “quarreling” words. Though he spoke numerous other languages (Romanian, Russian, French), and though he had written previously in Romanian, he nevertheless decided to remain in German, which he broke and reclaimed. German, for Celan, was the language that had to “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”
Why break a language? To wake it up. “We sleep in language,” writes Robert Kelly, “if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.”
— Ilya Kaminsky, “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us”
I am reminded of the (Marie Howe sourced) Joseph Brodsky quote: “You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”
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Non scriverti tra i mondi, tieni testa alla varietà dei significati, fidati della traccia di lacrime e impara a vivere.
- Paul Celan
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Paul Celan, quoted in "Addressable Thou", by Chase Berggrun, pub. The Brooklyn Rail [ID'd]
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The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.
For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.
Paul Celan, Collected Prose translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.
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