Thanks for that explanation, Frederick. I also like the poem enormously but
would like to change two things, if you'd be in agreeance.
Attributing the angel to Walter Benjamin in the poem makes it a literary
allusion, whereas if you put a quote from WB about the 'angel of history'
above the poem, the angel in the poem could be more directly realised. It is
a strong angel image so I feel it should be in the foreground, not clouded
by an agent bewteen reader and poem.
And, a simple matter, you have two 'Buts' close together.
>to turn, to warn us. But his wings
are caught in something spiky and
gluey. He's completely immobilized
as the pile before him slumps and settles.
But immobility for an angel
isn't the same as for us. He moves among us,
impeccably invisible in any
context, a turban, a baseball cap,<
How about scrapping the second But? 'Immobility for an angel / isn't ...'
While I'm sticking my nose into your poem, the term 'sub-prime-mortgaged'
seems too ... temporary for me. I can't find the exact right word, but it
clunked for me and drew attention to the Writing and distracted from the
Angel. Is it just me? We in Australia only hear this term in economic
reports on TV news when referring to USA's volatile finance sector, so it is
not an 'everyday' phrase for us.
Finally I'd like to say it is one of the best poems I have ever read on this
list. Thanks, Frederick.
Andrew
On 02/12/2007, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 2:20 PM
> Subject: Re: "Midrash"
>
>
> > Frederick Pollack wrote:
> >> Midrash
> >
> > Utterly astounding, even if I don't have clue one why it's called
> Midrash.
> > Doesn't matter: it's terrific.
> >
> > ken
> >
> > --
> Midrash is rabbinic commentary on the Torah (the Pentateuch) or on the
> Talmud, the initial body of such commentaries. Loosely, any textual
> hermeneutics carried out in a Jewish rather than Christian way can be
> called
> (a) midrash. In Walter Benjamin, Marxist and Jewish (even Kabbalistic)
> thought intersect, very notably in the "Theses on the Philosophy of
> History," which contain his parable of the angel. So my poem is a midrash
> upon that passage:
>
>
> A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he
> is
> about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes
> are
> staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures
> the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
> perceive
> a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
> wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
> awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
> blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a
> violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
> propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
> debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/
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