World War 3, or Mrs. Miller's Son


0 - Another Stranger Song

Did Leonard Cohen weep, when he heard
what happened here -- what happened there --

the man's so Zen
I don't think he went to heaven.
I don't think he needed God
when he cried out Hallelujah
on nine/eleven --
he cried out of posterity.

It's the Chelsea Hotel
he missed, when the bell
tolled for him, when he sank
deep into Abraham's bosom --

2 - Reply to a Postcard

How could you
walking dead on red slaver dew
still smell blue
when that cold infernal breath
you call a taut string death
snaps at Jew
and laughs?
Neck and neck,
some greater horror waits for me,
I'm sure. Shot in the head, at least you
had a Fanni and her fanny too
to comfort you -- while I,
I'm far too young.

1 - Duino Castle

He grasped and let go, chose and achieved, but you,
you grasped and gave, held on and stole
some minute portion of the glory for yourself,
not caring about the other. Distant, all you did
was fear, or weep, or wave with cleverness --
all we did. But hearing again God's call
and wrestling with his angel, now I see: there are the men
who do the deeds, and then there are the men
who tell them. Like you, I shan't sing fact
when the heroes are revealed, when these ravening rivers
of righteous men and clowns are drowned in gas:
distant, I will paint the picture of another Samson 
tearing down the pillars of Satan's tomb
then show it as truth to the rising dead.

3 - Woodstock in Taguig

Tell me when it's time to march --
I will not march.
Show me what you're fighting for --
I will not march.
Give me your thoughts, give me your feelings --
I understand, and will not march.
Fill me with hope, teach me with love --
all the more, I will not march.
Threaten me with steel and flame --
I will not march.

Witness: on the road to Yasgur's farm,
Capitol Hill, Malacanang,
a black thing lies --
for what is stardust,
billion-year-old carbon,
but some ugly lump of coal?

White heat! White, lying heat --


[I strung this up after failing to attend a certain protest. Hoping to get something out of all this, especially as this all feels kinda right --- yet reads kinda wrong. I guess the emotions of that season got to me so strongly (it was around November 8!) that I just can't judge this right.]

I like the way the numbers don't run in progression. Also, for me, #1, Duino Castle, is the strongest, but maybe because for me, Rilke's work is transcendental. In #3 I can hear Joanie Mitchell. #2 is interesting, because I don't know which Fanni you mean, but think it's maybe Fanni Gyarmati, the wife of Miklós Radnóti, who died towards the end of WWII during a death march in a forced labour camp. And of course #0 is Leonard Cohen.

The common thread is, of course, protest against war, but also shows glimpses of what more we, as humans, are capable of.

So far they don't sit easily together, for me, but this is definitely worth working further into. I think Leonard Cohen's work is more worthy of a Nobel Prize for literature than Dylan's, though I admire both writers.

thanks for the consideration! just to clarify, it is Fanni Gyarmati there -- i was hoping postcard (his fourth and darkest one is used as a jumping point there) and Jew would be enough ties.

The allusion is so thick in this one as to make it inaccessible to those who haven't read Cohen, or whoever. The pun in No. 2 is terrible :-D
And even the most accessible of the pieces, the final one, has a peculiar ending. It may work for some readers, I don't know.

(12-30-2016, 07:26 PM)Achebe Wrote:  The allusion is so thick in this one as to make it inaccessible to those who haven't read Cohen, or whoever.  The pun in No. 2 is terrible :-D
And even the most accessible of the pieces, the final one, has a peculiar ending. It may work for some readers, I don't know.

I would think it's to those who haven't read (or at least heard of) Rilke or Radnoti. The Joni section is, as you have noted, the most accessible (especially since as far as I know Woodstock is a really popular song), and I don't think the Cohen allusions run too thick (I mean, I think it works even without knowing the song "Hallelujah", or the reference to his fusion of Zen and Jewish all throughout -- the only really hard one there is "Chelsea Hotel", and that's discounting the title, which in that case I don't think is not necessary to understand). And even then, I only straight up quoted one Postcard in section No. 2 (the pun is very, very terrible -- and I think a clear enough clue?), and none in section No. 1 (it jumps off mainly from Duino 6 and a cursory reading of Rilke's biography, but then I think that section is straightforward enough to be understood as "the speaker talks to a cowardly poet"). So I don't think this piece is particularly inaccessible, compared to the other stuff I composed composing this (namely Babal and Up Mountains, the first being the mad mad hodgepodge this isn't, the second based on legends only 0.001% of the site knows), but I'll probably judge better if this gets moved to a critical forum -- it's that last section, and how everything really builds to it, that bothers me. Thanks for the notes!

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Also, I think this is the fourth nigh-incomprehensible four-sectioned piece I've posted on this site? Well, I don't really know what to make of that.