Jann Kross, The Czar’s Madman (opening line; trans, Anselm Hollo)

Voisiku, Thursday, the twenty-sixth of May, 1827

What a header…

By the numbers

                     numbingly

on goal (ho)

We’s all coming up lucky 8’s (even 18’s!)

Drivin’ at evermore material suck•cess

jes poolin cash, hon

Them’s can-do power numbers —

measure out own goals scored

S’okay, we’m all over summa dat

fresh minted 21^st century “Per-

mission Structure” pls

… & omission rupture fees

When we go hi we don’t / stay there for long

Tap-tap us into your proverbial “Narrative” pls

oh yo para nada of diddly squat

Even so, would prolly shake out

a hollo victory, squatter ^[1]

Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere (opening lines; trans, Peter Kussi)

Exactly when and where was the poet conceived?  ¶ When his mother pondered this question, only three possibilities seemed worthy of serious consideration: either a certain evening on a park bench, or a certain afternoon in the apartment of a colleague of the poet’s father, or a certain morning in the romantic countryside near Prague.  ¶ When the poet’s father asked himself the same question…

That’s more like it…

breeder’s back, keep it

flowing     num•erless

Look for life shout-out “elsewhere” —

Rimbaud, Breton, Paris ’68

yr own inner space (duh)

S’gotta be up on the miЯRor

not just vinyl evermore’s

You’ve survived MetaFictionWorld

And how is the weather?

What, were you expecting

a head trick? [2]

Gert Ledig, The Stalin Front (opening lines; trans, Michael Hofmann)

The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one… [He] had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what had once been a tree…  [Another] burst of machine-gun fire, his wrecked body came down…  The [tank] chains rattled… and what was left of the Lance-Corporal was rolled flat…  For four weeks, he gave off a sweetish smell.

FFS, signify something…       sign some-

thing, pls             Any dotted line…

His only signified —    lanced & blown to bits

But the signifier?          Can we shred to

smithereens too?

A grave, bitter par•lance

a corporeality signed off, severed, impaled

So on the wrong track, soldier!

Fewer or less scatter dangle that far

it’s flat-out un•countable

(Poetry is not in its tracks)

Lance was a corporeal (& funereal)

sweet-smelling hack w/

nowhere to turn

---

[1] The ‘header’: Voisiku, a town in Estonia (score 1-0?); numerology: 2+6 (=8), 1827 (=18); the two  italicized lines are from, respectively, the Anselm Hollo & Ed Dorn glosas in Broken Glosa: an alphabet book of post-avant glosa (Chax Press, 2023); & NB: Anselm Hollo, the translator here

[2] From Kundera’s own “Preface”: Life Is Elsewhere is a celebrated sentence of Rimbaud. It is cited by André Breton at the conclusion of his Surrealist Manifesto. In May [,] 1968, Paris students scribbled it on the walls of the Sorbonne as their slogan. ; this poem riffs on the earlier one, “Paul Headrick…”