Jann Kross, The Czarโs Madman (opening line; trans, Anselm Hollo)
Voisiku, Thursday, the twenty-sixth of May, 1827
What a headerโฆ
By the numbers
numbingly
on goal (ho)
Weโs all coming up lucky 8โs (even 18โs!)
Drivinโ at evermore material suckโขcess
jes poolin cash, hon
Themโs can-do power numbers โ
measure out own goals scored
Sโokay, weโm all over summa dat
fresh minted 21st century โPer-
mission Structureโ pls
โฆ & omission rupture fees
When we go hi we donโt / stay there for long
Tap-tap us into your proverbial โNarrativeโ 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? ยถ 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 poetโs father, or a certain morning in the romantic countryside near Prague. ยถ When the poetโs father asked himself the same questionโฆ
Thatโs more like itโฆ
breederโs back, keep it
flowing numโขerless
Look for life shout-out โelsewhereโ โ
Rimbaud, Breton, Paris โ68
yr own inner space (duh)
Sโgotta be up on the miะฏRor
not just vinyl evermoreโs
Youโve 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 couldnโt turn in his grave, because he didnโt have oneโฆ [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 treeโฆ [Another] burst of machine-gun fire, his wrecked body came downโฆ The [tank] chains rattledโฆ and what was left of the Lance-Corporal was rolled flatโฆ For four weeks, he gave off a sweetish smell.
FFS, signify somethingโฆ sign some-
thing, pls Any dotted lineโฆ
His only signified โ lanced & blown to bits
But the signifier? Can we shred to
smithereens too?
A grave, bitter parโขlance
a corporeality signed off, severed, impaled
So on the wrong track, soldier!
Fewer or less scatter dangle that far
itโs flat-out unโขcountable
(Poetry is not in its tracks)
Lance was a corporeal (& funereal)
sweet-smelling hack w/
nowhere to turn
[1] The โheaderโ: 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 Kunderaโs own โPrefaceโ: Life Is Elsewhere is a celebrated sentence of Rimbaud. It is cited by Andrรฉ 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, โPaul Headrickโฆโ
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