Eliot Cardinaux

[Recent work by Eliot Cardineax turns a new twist on Robert Duncan’s dictum: “I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters.” In his derivations from Celan and Mandelstam, along with the author’s note attached thereto, Cardineaux’s poetry and poetics stands as a refutation, too, to Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” as a necessary foundation for strong poets and strong poetry. What follows, of course, is not translation or transcreation either, though part of a continuum with translation, for the best and most adventurous among us. (J.R.)]

 

 

AFTER CELAN

 

I

 

See,

those knifecords —

 

a knot in the blood

overblown with margins

at that

 

enclosure —

wolfskinned.

 

Witness,

wisteria blowing

deep

 

into matter

and deeper.

 

 

II

 

Finch,

the lymph node swells

in the bark,

 

beneath it;

your translucent

hammertrunk,

it sleeps through the keyhole.

 

What the way,

hacks-through,

hacks-into,

the throat can give,

maybe weighs: this

branch.

 

 

III

 

Take these trimmings —

 

of whose shadow,

to whom

I belong,

 

round as a month

or a lunar

 

mouth’s-word —

at mouth’s-worth.

 

Horse-fetched

or Time-lent

still,

 

do they

flutter and bray?

 

 

IV

 

Lilac,

those soft

misty evenings

of decay

lent

your stole

a new scenting;

truth-rooted.

 

Paler than violets,

iris, the yolk-

stained hunger;

 

grounds in the morning

dew.

 

Does the round-empty day

not empty, also

the fading circus?

 

Who will inform,

 

return

to it

 

 

V

 

Excess,

the torpor-outridden —

the more-than-

stupor,

outrid

of its other,

my unaware,

 

distranslated

melancholy

breadmaker.

 

Bloodsucking second

hand-darkened,

of the pleat-enfolding

matterstopped tongue,

begun to rewind;

its thoughts,

blurted.

 

 

FOR OSIP MANDELSTAM

 

I

 

Lightlid, you tenderly shed

what soft and flaring

black sunbeams

bled to become.

 

The Jessamine’s

five suns faded

translucent as wax,

 

or the pale noon sun

of elsewhere

embraced by brambles.

 

Those witness, the mourners

and those

who attended the vigil

 

unsafe in the light of candles

even the acme of a twisted smile

longs to embrace, but can’t unmake.

 

And the red glare of sacrifice

finally forever

begins to silence

 

those parched singers;

never in my life

have I heard such music.

 

 

Author’s note: The poems presented here were the start of a year-long cycle, Around the Faded Sun, that began as an interpolation on the influence of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam on my very beginnings as a poet and led, coincidentally and not, to my return to the poetry of Adonis, whose work I was in awe of but never inhabited — until — vis à vis Pierre Joris, I discovered their “Conversations in the Pyrenees.”

 

Dealing with monotheism, these poetics in dialogue between Pierre, the poet and prolific translator of Celan, and Adonis, the great innovator of modern Arabic verse, opened in me a cavity which I was forced to attend to with the instruments at my disposal at the time. Regarding analysis, the market, gender, religion, and myth through the questioning lens of allegory, I took on the persona of the modern poet in order to challenge within myself all assumptions clinging at the root of my identity, sense of justice, and unknowing; the factory worker of my own philosophy as poet and as laborer per se. I felt the act of negation, deep at the heart of Adonis’s earlier poetry, and the acts of courage it enabled him, which I discovered for myself as I read more deeply into his later work. I hope these poems allow for a multiplicity of readings that extend beyond this explanation, which is mostly for myself. I thank Jerome Rothenberg for inviting my work into the sphere of Poems and Poetics, without whose poetry as well, this project never would have proceeded along said course, which to me has been fertile.