Hugo Claus - aka Jan Hyoens, Thea Streiner, Dorothea van Male and for a time
Mr Silvia Kristel - wrote a response to Georg Eliot's noisome - er, sorry,
fiercesome - quote. Not that he knew it. But I suppose he was acquainted
with that kind of thing. On the Nobel Prize he said "L'argent de ce prix
m'aurait bien arrangé". He opted for euthanasia on February 13 2008.
ENVOI
My verses are still yawning a bit.
I'll never get used to it. They've lived here
long enough.
Enough. I'm booting them out, I don't want to wait
till their toes get cold.
No more disturbance by their confused howls!
I want to listen to the drone of the sun
or of my heart, that perfidious sponge that hardens.
My verses don't screw classically,
they babble vulgarly or boast too grandly.
In the winter they get cracked lips,
in the spring they are laid up by the first touch of warmth,
they mess up my summers
and in autumn they smell of women.
Enough. I'm going to hold my hand over their head
for just twelve more lines on this sheet
and then they get a kick in the arsehole.
Go and moan somewhere else, you two-bit rhymes,
do your trembling elsewhere for twelve readers
and a snoring reviewer.
Go now, verses, on your light feet,
you didn't step too hard on the old earth
where the graves laugh when they see their guests,
one corpse piled on top of the other.
Go now and totter towards Her
that I don't know.
trans. from the Flemish
mjw
And the globe keeps rolling towards a pocket without a bottom although on
the way the green cloth field is smooth. - Louis MacNeice
----- Original Message -----
From: andrew burke
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 11:30 AM
Subject: quote
I've just blogged this fiercesome quote from George Eliot: “To be a poet is
to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and
so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered
variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes
instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of
knowledge.”
Challenging?
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
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