Kaffee und Küchen–Bligger Devon Miller-Duggan Revisits Germany

Kaffee und Küchen

We were in Germany again for spring break. When we lived there for 8 months after our wedding in ’77, courtesy of the flawlessly generous and gracious Humboldt Stiftung (foundation), I came home pretty negative about the land of many of my ancestors. I found the Germans formal-but-rude, intolerant, often plain mean in public, and generally unpleasant to live among. That being said, I met and liked a lot of individual people–I’m mostly talking collective behavior here. I liked living in Europe–loved many things about that, and some things about Germany in particular–the intense respect for the land itself, the train and transit systems, being able to have fizzy water delivered to our apartment, the scenery, the forests, the Gothic churches, the city of Freiburg. But the Germany of 35 years ago had not dealt with its past and was a country living with the huge wound of Cold War division. It’s a very different place now. Germans have done a remarkable job of confronting their past (I’m not claiming perfection, just profound commitment and ferocious care) and the wound has been healed–though that’s a difficult and ongoing process. But, generally speaking, the Germans I’ve encountered individually and en masse more recently are less formal, more polite, and much less chip-on-shoulder. It’s a lovely thing to see/experience–the healing of a nation. And all the things I liked before are still very much there, though a little less graffitti on the sides of nice old buildings would be good (that being said, there’s some astonishingly wonderful tagging in Berlin–I never object to art–but a lot of it is just vandalism and grade C work). 

And Germany’s comfortable. I speak a moderate amount of German (courtesy of the Humboldt Stiftung having put me through the Goethe Institut 35 years ago), and can more or less function. My husband (who’s a German historian partially because he made a nicely calculated decision about his field of study based on which country in Europe actually supported foreign scholars working there.) speaks beautiful German–he’s good with languages; I have a good ear and a bad memory, so I tend to sound like I have more German than I do, which can be a problem. Anyway, we know how to read the train and bus schedules and what the general rules of behavior are and all that stuff that makes being someplace easy. We like the food (which has also gotten hugely better in the past 35 years). And we are never likely to run out of things we want to see, or re-see, or do. The place is dense with culture from pretty much every period in Western history in a way that even Italy, for all its wonders and pleasures isn’t. I have a friend who’s an intellectual historian who likes to summarize things elegantly. He says that France has contributed importantly to culture in pretty much every period, but has only achieved the highest level of contribution in the creation of the Gothic cathedral, and maybe then again in Impressionist painting. But Germany has contributed at the highest level through much of the Common Era. I’m not sure this is entirely right, but it’s interesting/fun to think about. And pretty close to true. Of course, there is also the matter of Germany having committed some of the great crimes/sins/abominations in history.

And right there, I think, is the source of my fascination with the place. Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, the city of Dresden, and the (carefully legal and obsessively efficient) Holocaust. For me, at least, there is something profoundly important and compelling in that dialectic, something emblematically and crucially human. The Nazis were not monsters, except in so far as we all are, and it seems awfully important to me that we recognize and remember the extent to which pretty much all of us have the capacity to go there–so we have a fighting chance of avoiding it. 

I’m getting preachy and awfully close to political. Sorry. Here’s the thing: They put the Holocaust Memorial a block away from the Brandenberg Gate, and 2 blocks away from the Reichstag–seriously prime real estate, but more to the point, a pretty beautifully conscious and intentional statement of identity. Although they have carefully reconstructed many of the buildings we flattened (including, thank God, much of Dresden), they’ve left the broken-but-surviving tower of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche standing there next to a very clearly modern new sanctuary, so that if you get off the subway at the Zoological Gardens transit hub (it’s one of the major hubs, so many, many folks do) the war-battered tower is one of the first things a visitor to Berlin sees. Right there in the middle of the Ku-Dam–which is the Berlin equivalent of, say, 5th Ave in New York. We were in Munich, too, this time. Munich is gorgeous–mostly consistent and carefully reconstructed, and lushly full of delights—like the typically intense and still essentially whimsical Munich Surfers. It doesn’t hide its history. But it’s not quite as grubbily, richly complex as Berlin. 

It was distressing, 35 years ago, to find myself not liking the people who represent a big chunk of my ancestry. It’s really nice, now, to find myself liking and respecting them without having to pretend that they are or have been anything other than complicated and awful and also, always the people who nurtured Bach.

Read Devon Miller-Duggan’s blog Fat Matters.

Fred Wilson at the Pace Gallery: Venice Suite

Murano glass:

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two deaths: charles bukowski and mr. rogers

I thought this was perfect for poetry month–

two deaths: charles bukowski and mr. rogers
by Carl Kavadlo

one died just
before he turned 74 and
the other passed at
the same age.
one left in 1994, the other in 2003.
nine years apart,
two great men leave us.
one a drunk, gambler,
womanizer; other
a teetotaler, preacher,
long monogamous.
that man had a tv show for children
showing only the most
wholesome and preciously
safe shows. the other wrote
endless poems of whores, horseplayers,
the jailed, the mad, the off-beat english
professors. also had a large following of youth
and the young at heart.
one swore, drank, womanized.
the other a complete man of the cloth.
both artists
and both true to themselves.
we forget that sometimes
in judging
people – we mortals
so fast to cast the first stone;
but god treated both the same,
leaning into the deeper than
surface self, into the center of
the heart,

where both were pure.

3 Questions for Mary Alexandra Agner

1. What is you personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.

I think the line lets you emphasize two different aspects of a poem. The line calls the eye’s attention to the final and first words demarcating it. The line calls the ear’s attention to units of meaning in a poem that rhymes or uses alliteration. I try to combine both of these emphases because poetry without music is to depressing to consider and because I never know whether my reader will read my poem aloud. When I write, I follow the sound in the poem, but try to pick line breaks that emphasize important words within the syntax of the poem.

2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human body? Or between your writing and your body?

I’m very conscious of rhythm and sound while I write, and I feel those things within my body. I count out rhythm on my fingers but I also read aloud when revising; sometimes I even speak aloud as I write a first draft.

Reading/performing my work is also visceral: I sway while I read, in time to the meter of the poem, drawling and speeding up words in order to syncopate against the downbeat of the poem.

3. Is there anything you dislike about being a poet?

I dislike the response I get from folks when they find out I’m a poet: “Oh! I don’t understand poetry at all!” So disheartening. No one ever says they don’t understand painting or sculpture.

I also dislike the obligation to read contemporary poetry. I think it’s best for poetry if all potential audiences (including poets) are allowed to enjoy whatever types of poetry move them.

Bio: Mary Alexandra Agner writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets. Her most recent book is The Scientific Method. She can be found online at
http://www.pantoum.org.

Recent poem: http://stonetelling.com/issue6-dec2011/agner-lovelacenocturnes.html

No Library Card Required

The poetry class at SFCC recently visited the amazing show of book arts on campus. Responses from Paula Miller and Lorenzo Atencio below.

Lost at an Exhibit of Accordion Spines by Paula Miller

It was a lovely home with ghosts in the attic, frogs in the basement – the logs and pods – and in the very middle, the accordion spines of my books, wherein all the consonants are underground and weather palms wave their branches like drunken gods.

Here and there, the flitter and flutter in the Bosque – hummingbirds, pecking penguins, and the sculptured necks of cranes beaking the accordion spines to allow a billow of long folds which hide the Alphabetica Synthetica. These notes dangled like a musical scale of all my eliding senses, pressing wildflowers into its pages, their tiny petals releasing the tastes of red and sienna, the blue of bruises.

So many skins – pig, goat and sheep – made up the palimpset of the Coptic scripture with its very own music. How many times had bran and milk washed their surfaces and recycled their pleas for love and wisdom. How the pentimentos both hid and revealed their earlier repented messages! The fans of star corals lit up the room with cool breezes sweeping away the damp from the froggy basement.

On the main floor where propriety, love and good manners should reign I found Artemis, the huntress, bathing naked with poor Acteon already transformed into a stag but still gazing at her adoringly. If I tug on the accordion spine I release the fragrant pages of valerian and teasel, the greens of pulses and laurel; and along the alchemical spindle, icons spin with mummies and lidded Buddhas make music with their talas.

Over in the corner, darting among the bushes Merwin becomes Merlin hunting the bloomworm and pigeon to place in a pop-up guide to the trees, all the while waving his wand to pull down stars, tassels for his pointy hat.

At night when all is still I listen to the sleepers, dreamers and screamers; from the attic they are voicing the guttural songs of their neuroses and psychoses – their notations carefully written in the weave of an appetite for frog sounds in the 52 pages of the Elements of Botany.

At night when I dream I call up memory within the accordion notes and create a shrine to writing – the Illuminated Book of Hours, the Kells – wherein are minds on fire in its matrix and the not so subtle warning: “Don’t be so wealthy you can’t open your window at night.”

In the blue hour of the morning, when the birds are just preening before song, I look for hidden messages in the haiku accordion – a few short phrases to transport me beyond daily concerns for the mortgage and permit the embossment of contemplations on the accordion’s range of wind powered notes. At daybreak, I cringe at the terrorist values of frogs in the basement, of snakes weaving their charms from the attic out the windows, and then in again seeking a hurried retreat into the chthonic depths under the basement floor. In the news the Iraqis answer the question -what does war give to the people anyway except liberation in the form of democracy, whiskey and sex?

I set to work and take a few of these chords from the accordion’s folds to make a colophon for the back of its spine, embossing it with the marks of a stag beetle and hoping the day will go smoothly toward the evening. I love this house with its ghosts in the attic and frogs in the basement – this small life sized place of logs and pods, of myths and magic and shelves for my accordion spines.

Book Art by Lorenzo Atencio

A transporter like Mr. Spock’s

To take the imagination anywhere

In time, in space, in spirit,

We know a book is a vessel for our creativity.

Its pages hold the images and words of art.

But have you seen the book itself be the work of art?

Its pages and cover cut into pieces then reassembled into different images?

Like a bible that has been neatly cut and bound to cascade from birds’ beaks.

Book Art is like a poem, creating messages from images.

A poem takes a sentence, cuts it up and re-crafts the words

To capture our subjective reality.

Poem by David Parlato

Reflections

Raindrops falling upon white ocean spray,
Gold ingots jointed together, melting;
Two bodies of water conflux today:
Mending spirits, alchemical healing.

Our hearth flamed by wings of quick beating hearts,
Finger tips smearing oil to anoint
A mental bond forged fast by our love parts:
Melodies dancing, weaving counterpoint.

You, a mirror of me, reflecting you.
Are we together, or are we apart?
Roles in a play true, where we, we do woo:
Embers dying, we lose selves in our art.

Why do I feel this way, so lost at sea?
Is it true, that I am you, and you me?

david parlato

Did Anne Sexton Hate Me?

As an undergraduate, I went to many poetry readings. I learned how to listen, with a rapt (sincere or insincere) expression on my face. I learned to avoid drunken poets and would-be poets at receptions, and to not snicker when Beat street poets rose from the audience to spontaneously declaim about “the silver butterfly of life.”
I heard many famous poets read, but the big rock and roll event was Anne Sexton, at Harvard’s Saunders Theater, shortly before her death. She was dressed in a slinky black and white Mod outfit, sipping a highball. She looked–and felt–like one of those wicked queens in a Disney cartoon. The work was amazing, but somewhat lost on me, until years later. I was mesmerized by the feeling that she might crack. Right there. On stage.
Which she did not do. But instead received a standing ovation, like the prima donna she was. But I wasn’t standing up, nor was the friend I’d come with. Instead, two scruffy students, we sat, clapping, but seated.
Anne Sexton glared at us, and glared. Finally, intimidated, we stood up.
About a year later, she killed herself. One of her daughters was in my women’s history class and I was struck dumb by her look of pure suffering. I wish I’d been more of an adult then and known to have said something, anything, like “I’m sorry.” Instead, I sneaked a glance, and then looked away.

Dutch Artist Berend Strik

This is embroidery on photographs, for a very haunting effect. Click here to see more about the artist.

New Haggadah

The Book Bench
Loose leafs from the New Yorker Books Department

A Haggadah for the Internet Age
Posted by Sasha Weiss

Read more

Tonight is the first night of Passover, the holiday most celebrated by Jews the world over, and this year, many Seder-goers will be reading from “The New American Haggadah,” brought to us by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander. The challenge at the heart of every Passover Seder is analogous to the one posed by works of literature: the reader’s empathy should be triggered such that he is transported to a different time, place, and mode of thought. “In every generation,” the Haggadah instructs us, “a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out from Egypt.” But how exactly do we get into the mind-set of an enslaved Israelite while sitting at an opulently set table, with kids horsing around, and the smells of a roast teasing us from the kitchen? A lot depends on a lively telling of the Exodus from Egypt, and so it’s not surprising that two novelists have tried to reinvigorate the story for their own cohort of readers.
But this is no straightforward task, as the Haggadah is not a traditional narrative. It doesn’t engage us through the usual strategies of evocative description or heroic characters or a journey marked by obstacles: it is instead an unruly, layered, shifting text resembling a post-modern pastiche. The Haggadah was compiled over hundreds of years, and draws on a variety of sources: fragments of Biblical verse, Talmudic argumentation, folk songs, ancient prayers, and ritual instruction. At one moment you’re in the scholarly center of B’nei Brak in the third century, listening in on a dispute between two rabbis about the proper time to recite the she’ma prayer; then you’re reciting a blessing as you perform one of the Seder’s many strange (and strangely pleasing) rituals, like the dipping of a green vegetable into salt water; then you’re bellowing out—in celebration or in horror, it’s often hard to tell—the list of the ten plagues that God brought down on Egypt to hasten the freeing of the Jews.
If the Haggadah is meant to guide us through the Seder (“the order”), why is it so disorderly?

***
On a personal note, I find the Haggadah both very confusing and very illuminating. Last night I enjoyed reading about the four types of children and the questions they ask–as I’m a teacher, it seems like different kinds of learning styles. Plus, how can I not love a holiday that is about liberation and includes the prophetess Miriam?
On the other hand, all these old rabbis commentating away distract me. Plus, even the items on the seder plate aren’t always standardized. How many bitter herbs are we going for here?

Rethink

Anna Garforth