David Hockney: C. P. Cavafy in Africa, from “14 Poems from C. P. Cavafy 1966-67”
Dejected, reading the newspaper while riding the tram: he came across an apparent crime in the Police Blotter, a crime that had taken place the night before between ten and eleven. The murderer had not yet been found. The newspaper story, quite justly, abhorred the murder, but righteously showed its utter contempt for the victim’s degenerate way of life, for that individual’s depravity.
He read all about it, the contempt … and grieving in silence, remembered an evening between ten and midnight a year ago
[EDITOR’S NOTE. Starting to write as the Cultural Revolution was taking shape, Shi Zhi (born in 1949) appears today as an early forerunner to the changes in Chinese poetry that began to emerge during that time of repression and that have now come to represent the Chinese present. His life has been marked by periods of suppression and by recurrent and ongoing confinements for mental illness, but he is now widely recognized as a major influence on better-known groups such as the Misty Poets of the 1970s and 1980s, with whom he was later associated. Winter Sun, a selection of his poems translated into English by Jonathan Stalling, appeared this year as the first title in the Chinese Literature Today book series from the University of Oklahoma Press. (J.R.)]
From the hagg and hungrie goblin That into raggs would rend ye, And the spirit that stands by the naked man In the Book of Moones - defend ye! That of your five sound senses You never be forsaken, Nor wander from your selves with Tom Abroad to beg your bacon.
[As a preliminary to what would later become Technicians of the Sacred, I gathered as a section of my then magazine, Poems from the Floating World (1962-1963), a series of poems that were workings on my own grounds of poems that I had begun to assemble from a range of largely tribal/oral cultures.
[Nicole Peyrafitte’s move from the French Pyrenees to the United States came in 1987, and from California to New York in the 1990s. She has emerged in the new millennium as a multifaceted collagist, painter, singer & multi-media performer, and in her newest incarnation as a poet/verbal artist who moves readily between two worlds & languages. The following, then, is in recognition of my own witnessing to that career & life & to the energies behind it. (J.R.)]
Poems and poetics