And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

Mon Dec 14 04:27:14 CST 2015

 > I don't know who Herr Brinkmann is ...

You could change this!

http://www.praguepost.cz/night-and-day/books/9994-rolf-dieter-brinkmanns-revolutionary-poetry.html

 > Rolf Dieter Brinkmann is often called the James Dean of poetry - an 
apt moniker, given the effect his charged writing, which was completely 
at odds with the literary status quo, had on the German poetic 
establishment, as well as his tragically early death in a car accident. 
Unlike Dean, however, Brinkmann, as an inhabitant of West Germany, did 
not live East of Eden, but West of hell.

In contrast to many of his older contemporaries in post-war German 
poetry - Paul Celan and Günter Eich, for example - Brinkmann and his 
work were rather too experimental, too extreme to have been taken up by 
German departments at Anglophone Universities and widely disseminated in 
English - until recently. Mark Terrill, an American poet and translator 
based in northern Germany for the past two decades has brought 
Brinkmann's work into flowing, idiomatic English in several chapbooks 
and small volumes, and now offers a comprehensive bi-lingual edition of 
Brinkmann's poetry from 1962 to 1975, the poet's most productive period 
in the last decade of his life.

Brinkmann's poetry is informed by the New York School of poets like 
Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan, whom he translated into German. As such, 
his work is urbane, fast-paced and often seemingly inconsequential, with 
an off-the-cuff air that belies the seriousness of its author's 
intentions. Analogous to James Dean's performances - to push that 
comparison to the logical limit - Brinkmann doesn't care whether the 
reader "gets it," but is often intent on recording pure thought, 
reaction or emotion. In his own words, "poetry is not a waiting room 
where one stays overnight ... every word is war." As a result, the 
critical mind at times glances off these poems, but like pop-art, the 
medium is often the message.

Some of these poems present a record of their own occurrence, such as 
"Poem on March 19th, 1964, which records the moment of composition on 
several levels: "A pencil/ a sheet of paper/ a cup of coffee/ a 
cigarette/ ... a hand/ a few words/ an eye/ a mouth."

*An Unchanging Blue: Selected Poems 1962-1975*

By Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
Translated by Mark Terrill
Parlor Press
207 pages

Brinkmann's language is deceptively simple, making it easy to overlook a 
masterful choice of phrasing and line breaks - which Terrill has 
followed faithfully. This is a list poem expertly handled, especially 
the final stanza, which focuses us on the vocal nature of Brinkmann's 
and all poetry and is itself perhaps the pithiest ars poetica on record.

But Brinkmann is not a poet soaked in aesthetic theory, like Rimbaud he 
is a poet of raw vital energy, a poet of quick, wide observation rather 
than deep meditation. Brinkmann is also a poet with a wicked sense of 
humor, a bon vivant not afraid to get profane and delve in taboo.

"The Naked Foot of Ava Gardner" is a highlight of Brinkmann's pop-poetry 
mode. Here he captures the intersection of fantasy, memory and the 
unknown that sex symbols generate. Focusing this longing on Gardner's 
foot, which "is/ a nightmare, when it refuses/ to let itself be removed 
from/ your memory," Brinkmann shows his signature use of humor and deep 
seriousness at once, which appears more clearly later in the poem, when 
he admits "there are worse things than toes,/ this I know/ but there is 
nothing/ that can be compared to/ the toe of Ava Gardner."

But even this seemingly lighthearted poem takes on tragic dimensions 
when Brinkmann writes of "leaving the cinema forever," as if making the 
irrevocable pact of the wronged lover. In a parting jab that clues us in 
- if we are attentive - to his seriousness, Brinkmann summarizes the 
distant, personal interactions we have with film stars: "The memory is 
the one side/ the other side we'll never know."

Where Brinkmann delves most deeply, so to speak, into his subject matter 
is in his longer poems, which appear to the end of this volume. In those 
cases, it is a depth gained from considering a topic from several 
angles. From this point of view, An Unchanging Blue crescendos with the 
poem "Some Very Popular Songs," a 28-page tour de force set in several 
places, including the country and the city, Berlin and London. The poem 
is most famous - or infamous - for humanizing Hitler and his companion 
Eva Braun with passages like "Eva Braun, what did you feel when you/ got 
the capsule/ Did you simply think/ you'd had your chance?" and other 
more personal questions that aren't fit for publication here.

When one compares this post-war reckoning with Germany's past to the 
prescribed astringency of Group 47, leading poetic taste-makers at the 
time, who recommended paucity in language and emotion as a way to 
cleanse the German language and its literature, one sees just how 
revolutionary Brinkmann was, and why the academy would have wanted 
nothing to do with him.

Brinkmann was intent on humanizing these embarrassing historical figures 
whom others would have preferred to forget. Here we see a change in his 
poetry, from an impersonal, artistic aesthetic to a humanizing, personal 
one, which was nevertheless perfectly contra the dominant modes of the 
time: "My mother loved cheap paperbacks, she looked/ to see if the seam 
in her stockings was straight, she went// across the meadow in a silky 
shimmering dress."

"Some Very Popular Songs" is composed in perfect quatrains, except where 
the form expands, in several later pages, to an open field approach, at 
times with several columns, at times with words scattered across the 
page. This poem expanded the parameters of German poetry both formally 
and emotionally and as such stands as one of the most significant 
achievements in post-war German literature. It is a tragedy it is not 
more widely read.

But perhaps Brinkmann would have wanted it that way. As a poet who made 
no aesthetic compromises, Brinkmann insisted on following his own voice 
rather than prevailing trends. Like all great poets, his once 
incomprehensible, revolutionary voice has become more recognizable, and 
more significant in the decades since his death. An Unchanging Blue will 
stand as the definitive collection of Brinkmann's late work. If you 
enjoy the poetry of O'Hara and his contemporaries - perhaps the most 
vital period of 20th century American poetry - you cannot afford not to 
know Brinkmann, a poet who remained dedicated, despite hardships, to his 
appointed task: "To sing a song/ with no other purpose/ than to sing a 
song." <

GEDICHT

Zerstörte Landschaft mit
Konservendosen, die Hauseingänge
leer, was ist darin? Hier kam ich

mit dem Zug nachmittags an,
zwei Töpfe an der Reisetasche
festgebunden. Jetzt bin ich aus

den Träumen raus, die über eine
Kreuzung wehn. Und Staub,
zerstückelte Pavane, aus totem

Neon, Zeitungen und Schienen
dieser Tag, was krieg ich jetzt,
einen Tag älter, tiefer und tot?

Wer hat gesagt, daß sowas Leben
ist? Ich gehe in ein
anderes Blau.

(from Westwärts 1&2)

RDB also did collages of which you can get an impression here:

http://www.brinkmannszorn.de/

On 13.12.2015 14:54, Mark Kohut wrote:
> I don't know who Herr Brinkmann is---more intellectual gaps in this
> thingless American---but Williams' remark might exemplify
> why HIS [Williams] kind of poetry lost out to Pound/Eliots' modernism
> in his century. ( I think I remember reading how intellectually
> horrified Williams was by The Wasteland).
>
> I, a nobody, would argue that the complexity of modernity, the growth
> of historical intelligence, sociological and anthropological
> awareness, etc. means novelists of ideas win (if they are as good
> writers as Williams was a poet).
>
> Most Mann novels are still worth reading when Williams' couple are not
> now, right?
>
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 5:57 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>>> “Everything is contained in the American novel except ideas,” Philip Rahv
>>> wrote exasperatedly in 1940, just as the European novel achieved, in the
>>> hands of Musil and Mann, its intellectual apotheosis. <
>> "No ideas but in things." (W.C. Williams)
>>
>> And that's exactly what the writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann loved about
>> American literature!
>>
>> Btw, Brinkmann was among the first German readers of Pynchon's "V" which he
>> found in a London bookstore during the mid 1960s.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Dieter_Brinkmann
>>
>>
>> On 12.12.2015 15:46, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/books/review/whatever-happened-to-the-novel-of-ideas.html?ref=review&_r=1
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>>

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