Vitro Nasu

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January 23, 1930, Castries, Saint Lucia
Died: March 17, 2017, Saint Lucia
NYtimes obit

Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia. He was 87.

BBC obit

His great skill, and gift to literature, was the way in which he used his unique poetic voice to explore and explain the world from a largely unseen perspective.
He was never parochial or nationalistic, quite the opposite in fact. Derek Walcott was a master at using the specific to identify common ground and universal themes, illuminating both the individual and the collective.

Walcott wrote dozens of books of poetry and plays, among them his epic poem Omeros and his Obie-winning drama, Dream on Monkey Mountain.

From Canada (Warlus) The Stranger who has loved you.

(Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, and Derek Walcott in Brodsky’s garden)

via

Seen here with Seamus Heaney in Dún Laoghaire DART station, 1989 [photo: Matt Kavanagh]

Brilliant poets find one another: their world is very small even though their influence is wide and deep. Being a self-described “country boy” didn’t mean that Derek was cut off from so-called literary society. Derek’s closest poet friends, the Russian-born Joseph Brodsky and Irish poet Seamus Heaney, wrote about the pain and fascinating distance and longing that comes with being in exile.

A Mighty Poet has died (New Yorker)

Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott

Moring Paramin Derek Walcott and Peter Doig (See art by Peter Doig)

Photograph: From left: Tatyana Tolstaya; Mark Strand; Susan Sontag; Richard Locke, chairman of the School of the Arts Writing Division, and Derek Walcott.

Jonas Mekas: Where is poetry in your life?
Jim Jarmusch: It’s important to me. I read a lot of poetry. I studied with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at the New York School, and I’ve been guided by poets all my life.

Nagase and Adam Driver (“Nagase from Mystery Train reuninted with Jim Jarmusch in Paterson)

My journey from Marine to actor | Adam Driver

(Youtube excerpt here )

Golshifteh Farahani
(Golshifteh’s last film performance in Iran was in About Elly directed by Asghar Farhadi. According to her IMDB -Golshifteh was separated from Louis Garrel.)

LA Times on Paterson Poetry

Jim Jarmusch

Ron Padgett (Who wrote 3 poems for “Paterson”)

(Bill Berkson and Ron Padgett)

Previous post on Bill Berkson

nine poems by Ron Padgett

Night Jump

At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump

Who but Frank O’Hara
could have written that?
and then gone on to speak of
love and something he calls grace.
To start out so funny
and end up with mystery and grace —
we should all be so lucky.

Jim Jarmusch: I called the character Paterson, in the film, because of the poem Paterson by William Carlos Williams. He makes a metaphor in the poem of a landscape above the waterfalls there as being like a man. And then I just kept this metaphor; “I’ll make a film about a man named ‘Paterson’ who lives in Paterson, who writes poetry,” you know.

Jim Jarmusch and Jonas Mekas on Film, Poetry and Trump

Joseph Brodsky and Baryshnikov

New Year’s Day poem by Joseph Brodsky

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It’s clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it’s too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven’s light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

Dada Picabia

Picabia at MoMa..

Francis Picabia – 22 January 1879 – November 30, 1953

Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, André Breton called Picabia one of the only “true” Dadas.

Picabia

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Daughter Born without Mother
1916-18

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L’oeil Cacodylate, 1921

Google Picabia

I Am A Beautiful Monster
Who is with me is against me.

Duchamp, Beatrice Wood at Coney Island

“Entr’acte,” the avant-garde film he made in 1924 with René Clair, and his contentious series of figurative paintings from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Borrowing from art history, soft-core pornography and commercial art, they presage Pop Art, appropriation art and Neo-Expressionism.

Perpetual Movement

“Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” is a Picabia aphorism consistent with another one: “The only movement is perpetual movement.” The show has a propulsive, joyous energy. Something new, different and often challenging waits in nearly every gallery.

Dada is like your hopes: nothing like your paradise: nothing like your idols: nothing like your heroes: nothing like your artists: nothing like your religions: nothing

Previous post

Leonard Cohen

Can’t imagine a world without Leonard Cohen, a deep void we must face in “Future” and hear his song again.

Lonard Cohen dead at 82 (Rolling Stone)

Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca were Cohen’s favorite poets.

Long time ago I was about 15 in my hometown of Montreal, I was rumbling through….or rambling as you say down here. We say “rumbling” .Actually we don’t say that at all. I was rumbling through this bookstore in Montreal. And I came upon this old book, a second-hand book of poems by a Spanish poet. I opened it up and I read these lines : “I want to pass through the arches of Elvira, to see your thighs and begin weeping”. Well that certainly was a refreshing sentiment. I began my own search for those arches those thighs and those tears….Another line “The morning through fistfuls of ants at my face” It’s a terrible idea. But this was a universe I understood thoroughly and I began to pursue it, I began to follow it and I began to live in it. And now these many years later, it is my great privilege to be able to offer my tiny homage to this great Spanish poet, the aniversary of whose assassination was celebrated two years ago. He was killed by the Civil Guards in Spain in 1936. But my real homage to this poet was naming my own daughter Lorca. It was Federico Garcia Lorca. I set one of his poems to music and translated it. He called it “Little Vienese Waltz”. My song is called “Take this Waltz”.

Cohen and Dylan

With Sonny Rollings – Who by Fire

More from Leonard Cohen Archive.

Photo by Danny Lyon.

Dylan and Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel interviews a very young Bob Dylan in 1963 and it’s incredible

If you’re a fan of Dylan’s early work, I implore you to spend an hour with this stellar interview that he did with Studs Terkel from the spring of 1963 . You won’t regret it. It’s a very cool piece of history in my humble opinion.

Bob Dylan is a notoriously tough person to interview and that’s definitely the case here, even this early in his life as a public persona. On the other hand, Terkel is a veteran interviewer, one of the best ever, and he seems genuinely impressed with the young man who was just 21 at the time and had but one record of mainly covers under his belt. Terkel does a good job of keeping things on track as he expertly gets out of the way and listens while gleaning what he can from his subject. It’s an interesting match-up.

Studs Terkel “guerilla journalist”

Painting by Beverly Finster.

(Visiting Rubin Hurricane Carter)

Dylan and Levon Helm

Bob Dylan and Levon playing Ping Pong here.

Via Ray Grasse –

Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature – the award will be formally handed out on Dec. 10th, just as Jupiter crosses over the top of his horoscope (which pretty much confirms that birth time.)

Cohen – Dylan Interface –

It wasn’t [Bob Dylan’s] originality which first impressed me, but his familiarity. He was a person out of my books, singing to the real guitar. Dylan was what I’d always meant by the poet. – Leonard Cohen

If Nor For you – (photo by Willie Simpson)

Happy birthday Ben Whishaw

See Bob Dylan – photo by Danny Lyon..

Ted Hughes and Eliot

TS Eliot, his wife Valerie and Ted Hughes at – in Hughes’s words – ‘one of the champagne and guinness parties’ that Faber used to throw

Photograph: Faber Archive

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz-he dead
A penny for the Old Guy

Tom and Viv

The Fraught Friendship of T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx (New Yorker)

See Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burlington Snow” (1986)

Ginsberg blog

Bernie and Allen

With his big brother

Happy birthday Bernie Sanders!

Photos via

via Andrew Bonheler
See previous post on Bernie Sanders (Contempt for Voters, theater of cruelty, undemocratic primary of 2016.)

Martin Buber. I and thou.

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”
― Martin Buber

“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.”
― Martin Buber
Sparrow Impromptu in Portland – Hilarious Falcon Flying from Bosnia to Syria – War and Peace Spring of 2016

The Cop and Peter Cook the Comic Genius

Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing archive here.

Herman
and the Cat.. another photo from writing & the feline muse.

Herman Hesse – The Glass Bead Game

Yuichi Hibi – Neco

Kay Ryan
A CAT/A FUTURE

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she’s
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

Patricia Highsmith (archive)

With Frank Ohara

In a biographical note he wrote for An Anthology of New York Poets (edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro in 1970), Berkson paid tribute to O’Hara’s deep influence on him:

General ‘cultural’ education through friendship with Frank O’Hara: the Stravinsky-Balanchine Agon (and Edwin Denby’s essay on it), Satie (we created four-hand ‘annoyances’ at various apartments, once played for Henze in Rome), Feldman, Turandot, a certain Prokofiev toccato, Virgil Thomson (I had heard a recording of Four Saints at Harry Smith’s, Providence, 1957), movies … we read Wyatt together, recited Racine, skipped through galleries, collaborated on The Hymns of St. Bridget 1961-64, a note on Reverdy for Mercure de France 1961.

As he later told Brad Gooch, “I listened hard to what he said about poetry, about all the arts, about people, about living.”

Read For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson by Frank O’Hara here.

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Hymns St Bridget (jacket)

Hymns Of St. Bridget begins simply enough in October 1960 as the first collaboration between Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara — from there it multiplies energetically into an ongoing exchange between Berkson and O’Hara that includes the FYI poems, The Letters of Angelicus and Fidelio, and Marcia: An Unfinished Novel.

Wiki

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With Ron Padgett

via

Moore and Ali
via

He announced that if she was the greatest poetess in the country, the two of them should produce something together — “I am a poet, too,” he said — a joint effort sonnet, it was to be, with each of them doing alternate lines. Miss Moore nodded vaguely. Ali was very much the more decisive of the pair, picking not only the form but also the topic: “Mrs. Moore and I are going to write a sonnet about my upcoming fight in Houston with Ernie Terrell,” he proclaimed to the table. “Mrs. Moore and I will show the world with this great poem who is who and what is what and who is going to win.”

“We will call it ‘A Poem on the Annihilation of Ernie Terrell,’ ” Miss Moore announced. “Let us be serious but not grim.”

“She’s cute,” Ali commented. (read here via )

After we defeat Ernie Terrell
He will get nothing, nothing but hell,
Terrell was big and ugly and tall
But when he fights me he is sure to fall.
If he criticize this poem by me and Miss Moore
To prove he is not the champ she will stop him in four,
He is claiming to be the real heavyweight champ
But when the fight starts he will look like a tramp
He has been talking too much about me and making me sore
After I am through with him he will not be able to challenge Mrs. Moore.

Photo by Danny Lyon – 1970.