Karl Kirchwey, “Sonnet”

Tell me something I don’t know about love.

The story goes that Paul Verlaine’s mother,
Élisa-Julie-Josèphe-Stephanie Dehée,
kept her miscarried fetuses in a jar.
The poet, returning home drunk one night,
smashed them on the stone dining room floor.

Tell me something else.

Casanova once loved a woman who did not love him.
So he collected bits of her hair,
had them made into candies, and ate them secretly.

Love must not touch the marrow of the soul.

A poet said that, a long time ago.

Our affections must be breakable chains.

Mount Lebanon is the sixth collection from Karl Kirchwey. It also includes “Propofol” (published in The New Yorker), “Lenox Road” (The New Criterion, as “Three Oaks”), “Wissahickon Schist” (Slate), “The Red Portrait” and “Lemnos” (both in Poetry).

And then there’s “After Three Years” (Little Star), a translation of one of Paul Verlaine’s earliest poems; Kirchwey has translated Verlaine’s debut collection as Poems Under Saturn, also out this month. Here’s Kirchwey on Verlaine: “What appealed to me very powerfully was, first of all, the intense musicality of Verlaine’s lines– impossible to render in English, really, because English is a language of speech stresses, as French is not– and then also the combination of carnality and learning, in the poems. Verlaine was a hot-blooded young man in a repressive society, but he was also, at least intermittently, a spiritual and religious seeker and a scholar on the upward road to Parnassus.”

12 April 2011 | uncategorized |