Thursday, July 17, 2008

New Poet Laureate Named: Kay Ryan



Watch her and read more about her and by her
Library of Congress Announcement





Death by Fruit

Kay Ryan

Only the crudest
of the vanitas set
ever thought you had to get
a skull into the picture
whether you needed
its tallowy color
near the grapes or not.
Others, stopping to consider
shapes and textures,
often discovered that
eggs or aubergines
went better, or leeks,
or a plate of string beans.
A skull is so dominant.
It takes so much
bunched up drapery,
such a ponderous
display of ornate cutlery,
just to make it less prominent.
The greatest masters
preferred the subtlest vanitas,
modestly trusting to fruit baskets
to whisper ashes to ashes,
relying on the poignant exactness
of oranges to release
like a citrus mist
the always fresh fact
of how hard we resist
how briefly we’re pleased.


1 August 2000

©2003 Partisan Review Inc.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Herzog's Encounters at the Edge of the World


What is it about Werner Herzog's voice that makes his commentary go down so smoothly throughout his documentaries? The subject is always not just the subject but also his relationship to it. Here he is at the South Pole, interviewing a woman who studies seals milk (if you let it cool it would be like paste and you couldn't pour it). The seals lie on the ice indolent as hollywood starlets sunbathing poolside. Suddenly a scientist puts a plastic bag over the mother's head to extract her milk. She doesn't move, but tenses up and makes a noise.
Later, the scientist describes the noises the seals make underwater, a series of clicks and explosions, and unearthly music, as they travel and seek each other.

The penguins Herzog objects to, having seen too many of them already in the other cute endearing movies of recent years. So he finds a penguin who is deranged or just not interested in surviving. We watch it as it walks in the wrong direction to certain death.

We also meet a joyful scientist whose research is the iceberg which is constantly shifting, and another man who studies single cell organisms, a man made happy by the neutrinos that will be captured in the strastosphere by a helium balloon.

The scientists are travelers -- if you shook the world upside down, the people who were left would land here on the south pole.

But Herzog is most akin to the forklift operator who is also a philosopher. When he was young, his mother read the Odyssey to him, and he fell in love with the world, and has been traveling ever since.



Herzog's Encounters at the Edge of the World

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Munch’s Death in the Sick Room

Everyone’s gaze is slant,
to the ground, to the right, to the wall.
It is too much to bear. First she was sick.
The bottles of medicine sit futile on the mantel.
Bedclothes lie twisted and soiled.
Brother holds on to the wall.
Father’s grey hair points to the floor.
Sister clasps her hands and prays to a god not here.
Only you stand upright, dark circles under your eyes,
your eyes that stare straight at me.
You do not say anything with your grey lips.

Mother already attends to the corpse,
She knows this is an important thing
for the living to do, to tend to the body.

Your face, your single gaze, not in farewell, just
simple eye contact goes straight through me.