Zebra

Zebra

Victor Grauer


Imagine yourself in a pitch black cellar with a zebra --

Imagine a zebra wading in a shallow sea of blood.

On Translation

Paul Celan's best known poem, Todesfuge, usually translated "Death Fugue," contains the following phrase: "der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland," consistently translated as "Death is a master from Germany," or "Death is a German master." I've always been bothered by this, because in English calling someone a "master" in such a context makes little sense. Master of what?

Illness

Illness

by Victor Grauer

Illness is a kind of intoxication

In which you drink pure pain

Like a freezing glass of pure grain

Alcohol.  All your senses strain

Against a kind of ontological membrane --

If it breaks you die.

Flow

from Book of the Year Three Thousand, by Victor Grauer





flow through tender root and earth flow through tender root and earth like the fine rain fine rain that falls flow flow like the fine rain that falls flow flow through tender root and earth flow like the fine rain that falls flow flow like the fine rain fine rain that falls flow through tender root and earth flow

Resurrecting Scratch

This one was published several years ago in the Mississippi Review, but I can no longer find it there.

What is Poetry? A Manifesto

Before posting any poems I'd like to let my readers, and fellow poets, know something about how I stand on poetry, since my ideas on this topic are, to say the least, different. Some might consider them unreasonable or perhaps even dogmatic. They don't really reflect my "standards," because I don't really have any "standards." As I said in the first post, I don't believe in bad poetry. However, my little manifesto is important to me because it conveys a sense of what I find most meaningful in a poem -- and that, it seems to me, is very different from the way most people approach poetry. It might sound unreasonably narrow minded, and I don't consider myself a narrow minded person -- but I do find it important to express the essence of what to me lies at the heart of true poetry. Take  it or leave it, this is how I feel.

What follows was written some time ago, and is based on posts lifted from another of my many blogs:

"What is poetry? And if not what is poetry then what is prose?" That's probably the best general definition. Gertrude Stein.

Introduction

I've been writing poetry since childhood and for the most part keeping it to myself. And yes, I've had poems published, and I've occasionally read in public; and yes, people have from time to time had nice things to say about certain poems. But for the most part my life as a poet has been frustrating. All I've ever really wanted to do was share my poems with others, but for some reason it's never been as simple as one might think. The whole process of submitting work for publication is extremely distasteful. I was going to write "distasteful to me," but I'm sure it's distasteful to just about everyone.