Hung over: overindulged alcoholic poets as I have waded through two thick biographies:
- Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian
- City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch
Cure: hair of the dog (not more biographies but a return to the poetry).
First a jigger full of from Frank O’Hara “Meditations in an Emergency” [which excerpt forms the epigraph to Gooch’s bio of the New York poet]:
I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
Add one big ice cube chunk from Spicer’s After Lorca
Dear Lorca,
When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
And why not add a garnish from Lorca “A Flood of Tears for Ignacio Sanchez Mjias” (translated by Carlos Bauer)?
At five in the afternoon
Stirred. Not shaken.
And so for day 1190
17.03.2010