The Irascible Poet

Finding Celan in Hamburg

2011-11-26T05:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.antiquariat-pabel.de/en/index-en.html

I am one of those people who when I am in a city for a business trip I steal an hour or two for sheer pleasure and adventure. As a business person who moonlights as a poet it is a way for me to try to remember what matters most in my life and to reconnect with a part of me that is often dormant because of the demands of the world as it is. Last week I was in Hamburg on a business trip and Waltraud my wife came along staying with a cousin who lives in that humid but quite nice town.

Waltraud is sensible in a Teutonic way while I with my Italian sense of serendipity would just wander she researches and she found for me a transcendial moment. Waltraud found via the net an antiquarian bookstore Antiquariat Pabel right across from the great St Michael's church in Hamburg. The visit was transcendental for a few reasons. Pabel was founded by a man who was also the founder of the great Chicago Book Mart in the 1940's. This man was a Prisoner of war in the US from Germany and he turned that into one of the great bookstores in fact Chicago Book Mart was the progenitor of Guild Books (sadly dead) and Seminary Co-op (Thankfully still alive).

Our visit to this great store was in short wonderful. The store is everything that a bibliophile desires. Shelves of the finest editions. a 1589 Erasmus, a Soncino Missal, Shakespeare First edition in Germany from 1709.

But what I found made my year. A 1952 first edition of Paul Celan. Celan is a poet that challenges and frustrates. He was what the Christians call a witness. Like Perpetua standing in the middle of the circus his life was a witness to a truth and his poetry was the formation of that witness. Celan was a bridge to so much from the Austro Hungarian world of Freud and Vienna to the post war world of Nuremburg he spans it all. The edition that I bought is Mohn und Gedachtnis (Poppy and Memory). It was the book that made Celan a poet and it was published by a German publisher from Stuttgart in 1952. Surely on paper and with ink that had once been used to print Nazi books and was now publishing the greatest poet, in German, in the 20th Century.

To have found this book in Hamburg. Sold to me by a wonderful bookseller who understands as he said to me that books are transitory that they are created things and that they have memory is a good answer to the iPadization of our literature. This small volume is printed as Celan wanted to be printed. It is a created thing and it sits on my shelf right next to Ezra Pound just to make sure that it inoculates the shelves.

We are entering a world of the transitory. It is only in moments like the one I had a week ago at Antiquariat Pabel that I again can feel my toes and my fingers are not numb.

I love this Video--Go Hawks

2011-10-29T10:49:00.001-07:00

http://vimeo.com/29065832

You know what there is nothing better than a Big Ten Football Saturday

Go Hawks

Weimar Germany in Iowa

2011-10-22T17:00:00.001-07:00

I was recently in Europe and from that vantage point the current situation in the USA becomes much clearer. It seems that the goal of the Right in America is to in fact destroy the country by not allowing our elected president to do anything. In fact America has become much like Weimar Germany with protest groups dominating the debate. In my analysis the Tea Party are playing the Nazis and the Occupy Wall Street Folks the KPD Communists.

In the end there is only one winner and that is China, Brazil and India. I firmly believe that Eric Cantor and the rest of the Right want to destroy President Obama because they are in the pay of these new powers. Just as the Nazis were in the Pay of major Bankers and the KPD Communists were in the pay of the Stalinists. The end for America is an extremism that no one wants but that benefits only these small interests.

Watching the Republican Debates is so depressing. Mitt Romney who believes in nothing except magic underwear, Herman Cain who should be selling Snuggies on late night TV and Rick Perry who escaped from a NASCAR video. But, I believe that America has broken itself and while our friends on the Right like to quote that paragon of Fascism Ayn Rand the world we have created is not her dystopia but in fact Weimar Germany- in Iowa.

After 9/11 America is a Different Place

2011-09-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

On September 11th 2001 I was making a presentation to the Economic Club of Milan, Italy when a member of our office's admin staff entered and said in Italian "they blew up New York". My wife was at that time working in Mid-town Manhattan and so I was of course worried amid all the other pain. I can remember driving from Milan to Verona listening to Italian news radio with the world "Crollato" or crushed repeated over and over again. The night of September 11th I was in Verona for a business dinner and the owner of the Trattoria picked up the tab for his "Bresciano-American" friend (that would be me).

The next six months were dreadful. We lived in Princeton, NJ so our train station was covered with those printed signs "lost my husband, lost my wife". It was a time of great sadness and great loss. Americans reacted sometimes well and sometimes not but the nation was changed mostly for the worst.

America pre 9/11 was astride the world as a super power America after 9/11 was something else. In 2011 America remains engulfed in an economic and mental depression. I think that once a nation has been in economic collapse for three years it is safe to call it a Depression. We are in this collapse because like empires before us we spent our riches on global adventures and bread an circuses for our people to keep them mollified in the face of pain and despair.

In the end America is a different place.

Conservatives like to hearken back to Ronald Reagan, Liberals to JFK and FDR but both of those Americas no longer exist. The America of FDR and JFK was young vibrant place where anything was possible and where a generation- the greatest one- made sacrifices to do great things like Medicare, Civil Rights and putting a man on the moon. Reagan's America too no longer exists. The factory towns of the Midwest are now empty. The sunbelt was built on false money and false prosperity and the reserve of good will and frugality that existed in Reagan's time has been spent.

So what are we to do?

I recently was in Sao Paulo Brazil and I saw something. In that vibrant city there are many cafe's as their are in Italy but now smoking is not permitted. So a man stood outside the cafe with a Formica board around his neck with two ashtrays. He flipped up the board and invited the men drinking coffee to come and have a cigarette with their coffee on his board- he then asked for a Real tip. I thought- what a great idea- the fact is that America needs to do the same.

We as a nation need to realize that our ideas matter. We need to also understand that unless we change the conversation and subvert the rules (the way the man in Sao Paulo did with his board) we are doomed to stasis and weakness. The future seems to have moved to Beijing and Sao Paulo but are their ideas better?

It is time to forget 9/11 and to remember why July 4th 1776 is a holiday and September 11th 2001 is not.