![\"karl-kirchwey.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/karl-kirchwey.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nTell me something I don’t know about love.<\/i><\/p>\n
The story goes that Paul Verlaine’s mother,
\nÉlisa-Julie-Josèphe-Stephanie Dehée,
\nkept her miscarried fetuses in a jar.
\nThe poet, returning home drunk one night,
\nsmashed them on the stone dining room floor.<\/p>\nTell me something else.<\/i><\/p>\n
Casanova once loved a woman who did not love him.
\nSo he collected bits of her hair,
\nhad them made into candies, and ate them secretly.<\/p>\nLove must not touch the marrow of the soul.<\/i><\/p>\n
A poet said that, a long time ago.<\/p>\n
Our affections must be breakable chains.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Mount Lebanon<\/i><\/a> is the sixth collection from Karl Kirchwey. It also includes “Propofol<\/a>” (published in The New Yorker<\/i>), “Lenox Road<\/a>” (The New Criterion<\/i>, as “Three Oaks”), “Wissahickon Schist<\/a>” (Slate<\/i>), “The Red Portrait<\/a>” and “Lemnos<\/a>” (both in Poetry<\/i>).<\/p>\n
And then there’s “After Three Years<\/a>” (Little Star<\/i>), a translation of one of Paul Verlaine’s earliest poems; Kirchwey has translated Verlaine’s debut collection as Poems Under Saturn<\/i><\/a>, also out this month. Here’s Kirchwey on Verlaine<\/a>: “What appealed to me very powerfully was, first of all, the intense musicality of Verlaine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lines\u00e2\u20ac\u201c impossible to render in English, really, because English is a language of speech stresses, as French is not\u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}