In
"The Spacious Firmament", John Ashbery refers to Heinrich von Kleist:
"I stand holding a bunch of keys, / burn up my motto, read Kleist in
November." In the Northern Hemisphere, November can be a figure of melancholy, but the
connection with Kleist is dark: on 21 November 1811, Kleist and his friend
Henriette Vogel (who was dying of cancer) went to the Wannsee in Berlin, where
Kleist first shot her and then himself. Ashbery's next lines wonder whether
"I cannibalize others' lives, / the lives of others' words": the key to
not "cannibalizing" Kleist's life and words, then, is to not make
them a motto that one has to burn. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 December)
No comments:
Post a Comment