Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time.
Think how many, by now, have escape the world's memory.
Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to
live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through
areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils.
His hope: intermittent.
To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though
he feels, true enough, death's wither-clench. Thinking always of
something permanent, watching the while how everything goes on
changing.
He has seen where Speed is buried. Eyes exorbitant.
He has the tension of male and female: active, divided. Anger and
lust. What he eats tastes exactly like real food.
He would search out interphenomena, if he could decipher the
interstices. The broken line. Immediate havoc. Circular heaven.
Square earth. He cries world world, and there is no world.
He claims superiority over the other animals, being the only one
who can talk, the only one to have doubts.
Herr Stimmung knows a whale is big. Its skeleton might shelter a
dozen men.
Not existing, not subsisting—insisting. Not object, not subject—
eject. (He works within opposed systems, every one of them opposed
to system.)
"Fillette"—in confusion he addresses himself—"n'allez pas au bois
seulette."
He knows who is allowed to wear what kinds of beads. He knows
how fruit trees are inherited. All his self-objects lie in the inoperative
past.
Herr Stimmung springs from a long undocumented ancestry.
He has a special attitude towards terror.
Keith Waldrop
b. 1932
Keith Waldrop, who was awarded the 2009 National Book Award for poetry for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, has been a prominent voice in American poetry for over forty years. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, prose, and translations.
Waldrop was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1932. He enrolled in the pre-med program at Kansas State Teacher’s College, but his studies were interrupted in 1953 when he was drafted into the US Army.
While stationed in Germany during the 1950s, Waldrop met his wife, the poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop. He earned a PhD in comparative literature in 1964 from the University of Michigan and has taught at Brown University since 1968.
In addition to being an internationally celebrated poet, Waldrop is a respected translator of French literature.
Waldrop’s poetry navigates concerns that are at once personal and philosophical by representing a world that is endlessly strange and fascinating.
There is, in Waldrop's work, a steady thought directed to the way that we make our way in the world by thinking and speaking. Where Wallace Stevens gave us the portrait of a man bothered by the march of ants through his shadow, Waldrop gives us the disturbances of the world in its representations.
Upon receiving the National Book Award, the judges said of Waldrop’s poetry: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has.
These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”
