is an author of four books and for one of them she was awarded The Alberta Prize, for a first or second full-length collection of poems by an American woman. Telephone, her first play, was produced at the cherry lane theatre in 2009. She is translating from French.
Does a resemblance really mean anything.
The world rhymes too much. Maybe.
A situation of the similar kept aloft by an air that is hating.
I spell it like that because I mean it.
Well, maybe a situation can find a way to be a family against your will.
Or maybe that's just psychoanalysis, I was going to write.
All this "meaning." It is rhyme. Is just rhyme.
And this, this could be it. Liberty.
I am harassed.
Tonight three guys in a car said can we help you with your hardon.
That was the most genderfuck catcall ever pretended I wasn't hearing
as I walked by it. .
I am so tired, deep deep inside. I am tired.
This ceaseless squabble. What Mandelstam said.
What. Now what. Go on. Go on.
Does a resemblance really mean anything.
The world rhymes too much. Maybe.
A situation of the similar kept aloft by an air that is hating.
I spell it like that because I mean it.
Well, maybe a situation can find a way to be a family against your will.
Or maybe that's just psychoanalysis, I was going to write.
All this "meaning." It is rhyme. Is just rhyme.
And this, this could be it. Liberty.
I am harassed.
Tonight three guys in a car said can we help you with your hardon.
That was the most genderfuck catcall ever pretended I wasn't hearing
as I walked by it. .
I am so tired, deep deep inside. I am tired.
This ceaseless squabble. What Mandelstam said.
What. Now what. Go on. Go on.
An alabaster fidget is impossible to imagine
Nevertheless they spent a long time wanting to fuck statues
And having hair that didn't move when a wave came.
The wave rises to a point and pierces the moon.
It is night. I have a jaw which could be a gunwale,
I have the night which is hemp cord in my hard hand.
Nobody fucking understands, when the building coughed up the white
Rubble of everything, whitening us with its dust, a little blood on our lips
We were the real's dead mimes. Or stained minutes.
This is a permanent poem. If I don't fuck today I'll die.
This is a poem the size of almost nothing: a blotter made rude
By its inexorable silkening.
A wobble ate canned pie filling and, like the centuries,
Grew into an angry augur.
All time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning.
An alabaster fidget is impossible to imagine
Nevertheless they spent a long time wanting to fuck statues
And having hair that didn't move when a wave came.
The wave rises to a point and pierces the moon.
It is night. I have a jaw which could be a gunwale,
I have the night which is hemp cord in my hard hand.
Nobody fucking understands, when the building coughed up the white
Rubble of everything, whitening us with its dust, a little blood on our lips
We were the real's dead mimes. Or stained minutes.
This is a permanent poem. If I don't fuck today I'll die.
This is a poem the size of almost nothing: a blotter made rude
By its inexorable silkening.
A wobble ate canned pie filling and, like the centuries,
Grew into an angry augur.
All time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning.
I am so lazy
All I want to do is look good and write poems
And all I get to do is write poems because my time has not yet come to look good. Sometimes
I stand up and sit down thinking about my poems
Truly they are so excellent that I should be famous
And someday too I should look good enough to stand alongside them
Maybe this will happen someday
But not today
However even better than this would be
The destruction of the system that causes
Me to fantasize in such an idiotic way. Should I destroy myself or try
To attain the heights within this system first
And then destroy myself after I have become sanctified
By what is to be despised here?
As I write you I am listening to NEU! What I am trying to say is
In the middle of the night last night I tried to watch a movie
By Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Not a movie but rather the first episode of a miniseries, I am sure you know it, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
You see, this week I am taking care of the vegetable garden
Of two dear friends who are real intellectuals. The Berlin Alexanderplatz DVDs
Are owned by them. Once I badly wanted
An older man, loutish but refined, and I remember his red
Mouth saying the word FASSBINDER
While he held his young son in his arms. NEU! is very sexy music.
Have you ever listened to it? I learned about NEU! very late, like two months ago?
From a boy I was fucking until last week, though perhaps I will see him again. You see, Although my looks are melancholic and owlish I remain culturally
Retarded and all the powerful things that have been done, even thirty years ago, only come
To me peevishly, occasionally, through the people who condescend
To share their time and superior knowledge with me.
I do possess a sensibility that could not be called deaf to culture
But my narcissism has become so exhaustive that it takes up almost
All my time. There was a time
Five or six years ago that I would meet people who would say Ariana,
Have you seen The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant? No, I would say, I haven't,
I really should though, I wish I was a cinephile! I should stop reading Medieval
Poetry, because after all I cannot stay safe and uninfected just
By hiding in things so very old. People who watch movies are such dreamers,
I would say, and I want to be one, a dreamer, and feed myself with stronger stuff
Than the things I feel safe in because nobody living is there.
I should dream in other ways, more ambitious ways, and could if I were
A person who watches movies. But at that time it took equipment
And patience, more of both than it takes now.
Actually some years ago I finally watched like half
Of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. It made me uncomfortable
About being female. But anyway
Last night I tried to watch Episode One
Of the revolutionary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz
Based on the novel by Alfred Döblin to which, incidentally,
My writing has been compared, and five times I watched
The establishing shot of the man walking along walls in bright sunlight only to find
That when the first words in the episode were spoken, I think by a soldier,
The subtitles were not on, and every time I thought I had turned them on
It turned out they were not on, and I tried again and again,
Becoming serener and serener as the night wore on, serener because more
And more resigned, and I watched
The sun fall on the cracks in the man's face as he walked down the street
Until the moment something in German was said, and the dread
That had woken me up and caused me to want so badly to see a movie slowly
Ebbed and was replaced with the dread
That fill s the establishing shot of the film, the man with his face
Moving in clots of light along walls that move past different versions of white.
Finally I had to accept that the subtitles were not going to go on
And feeling tormented that I am neither a famous poet nor a woman whose looks resemble
The vapidity of her aspirations, my thoughts turned to a man
I loved once, a German whose name was Rainer, and who, when I asked him one night
What his middle name was, said "Maria" in the most insulting tone
Of voice you can imagine, for Rainer knew that I was fanciful
And though to know Fassbinder begged a sophistication different
From the one I had then developed as insulation against
The cruel and elegant persons of my age, Rilke
Was something that I knew and that my breathlessness and overt
And beating heart also knew well. Oh
Well. Maybe someday I will learn what it meant in the Seventies
To be a revolutionary. These ideas are important
To the culturally successful people who maintain
That this system must be overthrown and what I accept
As the c1early suicidal mass, which to participate in it
Means to agree to it
Ought not to be accepted. I should
Simply try to succeed while not accepting, though I hate to try
At all. I should
Become the ally of cultural critics who at certain periods
Of the night too become romantic, and I think I even will,
As soon as I can overcome the fantasy
That my dreams might become sweet
Again, and fragrant, neither oppressively
Narrow scenes in which I dominate the culture
As both hero and heroine, a sacrificer melted down
To become the very ore of beauty that makes worlds, nor
The inheritrix of products
Delivered in the form of somebody else's
Secrets, bequeathed in films, in books, in cuts of clothing
That to attain the truth they point to
I have no choice but to pass through
And agree to them, their canniness
And history, its limits, and the obsessions
(Which are not mine) legitimated by them
For having passed.
I am so lazy
All I want to do is look good and write poems
And all I get to do is write poems because my time has not yet come to look good. Sometimes
I stand up and sit down thinking about my poems
Truly they are so excellent that I should be famous
And someday too I should look good enough to stand alongside them
Maybe this will happen someday
But not today
However even better than this would be
The destruction of the system that causes
Me to fantasize in such an idiotic way. Should I destroy myself or try
To attain the heights within this system first
And then destroy myself after I have become sanctified
By what is to be despised here?
As I write you I am listening to NEU! What I am trying to say is
In the middle of the night last night I tried to watch a movie
By Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Not a movie but rather the first episode of a miniseries, I am sure you know it, Berlin Alexanderplatz.
You see, this week I am taking care of the vegetable garden
Of two dear friends who are real intellectuals. The Berlin Alexanderplatz DVDs
Are owned by them. Once I badly wanted
An older man, loutish but refined, and I remember his red
Mouth saying the word FASSBINDER
While he held his young son in his arms. NEU! is very sexy music.
Have you ever listened to it? I learned about NEU! very late, like two months ago?
From a boy I was fucking until last week, though perhaps I will see him again. You see, Although my looks are melancholic and owlish I remain culturally
Retarded and all the powerful things that have been done, even thirty years ago, only come
To me peevishly, occasionally, through the people who condescend
To share their time and superior knowledge with me.
I do possess a sensibility that could not be called deaf to culture
But my narcissism has become so exhaustive that it takes up almost
All my time. There was a time
Five or six years ago that I would meet people who would say Ariana,
Have you seen The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant? No, I would say, I haven't,
I really should though, I wish I was a cinephile! I should stop reading Medieval
Poetry, because after all I cannot stay safe and uninfected just
By hiding in things so very old. People who watch movies are such dreamers,
I would say, and I want to be one, a dreamer, and feed myself with stronger stuff
Than the things I feel safe in because nobody living is there.
I should dream in other ways, more ambitious ways, and could if I were
A person who watches movies. But at that time it took equipment
And patience, more of both than it takes now.
Actually some years ago I finally watched like half
Of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. It made me uncomfortable
About being female. But anyway
Last night I tried to watch Episode One
Of the revolutionary filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz
Based on the novel by Alfred Döblin to which, incidentally,
My writing has been compared, and five times I watched
The establishing shot of the man walking along walls in bright sunlight only to find
That when the first words in the episode were spoken, I think by a soldier,
The subtitles were not on, and every time I thought I had turned them on
It turned out they were not on, and I tried again and again,
Becoming serener and serener as the night wore on, serener because more
And more resigned, and I watched
The sun fall on the cracks in the man's face as he walked down the street
Until the moment something in German was said, and the dread
That had woken me up and caused me to want so badly to see a movie slowly
Ebbed and was replaced with the dread
That fill s the establishing shot of the film, the man with his face
Moving in clots of light along walls that move past different versions of white.
Finally I had to accept that the subtitles were not going to go on
And feeling tormented that I am neither a famous poet nor a woman whose looks resemble
The vapidity of her aspirations, my thoughts turned to a man
I loved once, a German whose name was Rainer, and who, when I asked him one night
What his middle name was, said "Maria" in the most insulting tone
Of voice you can imagine, for Rainer knew that I was fanciful
And though to know Fassbinder begged a sophistication different
From the one I had then developed as insulation against
The cruel and elegant persons of my age, Rilke
Was something that I knew and that my breathlessness and overt
And beating heart also knew well. Oh
Well. Maybe someday I will learn what it meant in the Seventies
To be a revolutionary. These ideas are important
To the culturally successful people who maintain
That this system must be overthrown and what I accept
As the c1early suicidal mass, which to participate in it
Means to agree to it
Ought not to be accepted. I should
Simply try to succeed while not accepting, though I hate to try
At all. I should
Become the ally of cultural critics who at certain periods
Of the night too become romantic, and I think I even will,
As soon as I can overcome the fantasy
That my dreams might become sweet
Again, and fragrant, neither oppressively
Narrow scenes in which I dominate the culture
As both hero and heroine, a sacrificer melted down
To become the very ore of beauty that makes worlds, nor
The inheritrix of products
Delivered in the form of somebody else's
Secrets, bequeathed in films, in books, in cuts of clothing
That to attain the truth they point to
I have no choice but to pass through
And agree to them, their canniness
And history, its limits, and the obsessions
(Which are not mine) legitimated by them
For having passed.