Tuesday, January 12, 2010

News at Eleven: These poems [by Samuel Beckett] need

to be read three-dimensionally: that is, turned slowly until the variety of each poem's facets bring pleasure, if not always sense: "grave suave singing silk/stoop to the black firmament of areca/rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows"--"areca" being a palm producing astringent nuts (excremental activity is a Beckett motif). There's no doubt that the poet, like John Ashbery in our own day, was responding to the scintillant elusiveness and collage-ism of modern French poetry, his free-ish translations of Apollinaire or Éluard bringing regret that he did not try his hand at more.

from The Guardian: Selected Poems, 1930-1989 by Samuel Beckett

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