It’s a huge subject, death. I know this, and yet I still want to write about it today.
Two stories from StoryCorps that moved me recently: Brian Korbon: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120580047 + http://storycorps.org/listen/stories/gregg-korbon-and-his-wife-kathryn/
David Shea: http://storycorps.org/listen/stories/david-shea-and-alice-doyle/
A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief: “These deeds shall thy memorial be,
fear not, thou didst them unto me.” Reznikoff:
The war may, however, have been the reason why he printed, on the press which he had installed in the basement of his parents’ home in Brooklyn,a small selection of his poems, which he called Rhythms. This little book appeared in 1918, and among the verses was “On One Whom the Germans Shot,” lines inspired by Ezra Pound’s memorial to his gifted friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed in battle in France in 1915: How shall we mourn you who are spilled and wasted, Gaudier-Brzeska, sure that you would not die with your work unended, as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower? When he reprinted the poem in 1920 he dropped the title, and in 1927 he dropped Gaudier-Brzeska name, but the remaining lines (which Zukofsky praised in the February 1931 “Objectivists’ Issue” of Poetry) are evidence of the thoughts of death which were haunting so many young men like Reznikoff during the war.
—from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-reznikoff
J.V. Cunningham
The art of obituaries. Economist book of obituaries and others
beside the art of elegy—another day.
Grace Paley’s mother: http://readashort.blogspot.com/2008/06/mother-by-grace-paley.html
Shakespeare, St. Crispin’s day?
Epitaphs for Niedecker: For L.N. by Allen Ginsberg as her breath was now her body, lonely poet far from cities one in the world. Bunting for Niedecker: To abate what swells / use ice for scalpel. / It melts in its wound / and no one can tell / what the surgeon used. / Clear lymph, no scar, / no swathe from a cheek’s bloom Niedecker for Bunting: “The Ballad of Basil”
They sank the sea All land enemy
He saw his boats stand and he off the floor
of that cold jail (would not fight their war)
sailed anyway Villon went along Chomei
Dante and the Persian Firdusi—
rigging for his own singing
Kubler-Ross On death and dying
Vollmann rising up rising down
Becker’s Denial of Death