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Light Reading by Stephan Delbos Book Preview

Light Reading, the first full-length poetry collection from poet, playwright, translator and editor Stephan Delbos, ranges from micro-minimalist poems to all-encompassing lyric declarations and metatextual litanies. The book’s first section, “Light Reading,” begins with an aubade and ends with a lullaby. In between, these short poems grapple with the marks words make on existence, exploring themes of language and memory, and confronting the work of poets and thinkers including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, John Milton, Jack Kerouac, William Bronk and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second section of the book, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” includes an elegy for Czech playwright and President Václav Havel, and poems inspired by the composers Philip Glass, György Ligeti and Johnny Rotten, among others. These open-ended lyrical narratives playfully explode the minimalist complexity of “Light Reading.” The book’s third section, “Arrangements,” is a series of creative directives for poetry that takes metatext to the max. Light Reading exhibits a startling formal range and a delightful eclecticism of poetic thought. Fragmentary, elliptical, and aphoristic, Stephan Delbos’ lyrics resonate beyond the page. As he notes, “language / outlives us.” If American poet Bill Knott whispers below these cool surfaces, so too do Celan and Ritsos, allowing Delbos the “Ghost notes” of his interior yet cosmopolitan voice. There’s warmth too (“here / hang / your / shells / shadows / shame”) and playfulness (“I carry music like Samson / in my beard and later / on my Samsung”). Light Reading, as the title suggests, is breezy and prophetic, mirror and depth, and pleasurably “drunk on wordscotch.” —Michael Waters Lorine Niedecker called her work a “condensery,” and the term is equally appropriate to the poetry of Stephan Delbos in his brilliant Light Reading. His minimalist pieces are charged with rare wit and intelligence, his bagatelles are as poised and surprising as those of Bartok, and his tongue-in-teach suggestions for his fellow poets turn out, ironically, to be wise advice despite themselves (“A poem controlled by someone else / A someone who doesn’t speak your language”). According to Delbos, “What is worth believing / is impossible / to believe / and really only / that will save you…” And you better believe it. —Norman Finkelstein The poems in Light Reading interrupt silence with whispers, occasional shouts, erasures’ spaces. Delbos’ lines resonate with startling spontaneity and sprezzatura. A master minimalist, he writes with risible daring and poignance. His mind’s at poetic play throughout these refreshing poems, leaping with erudition, oneiric strangeness, and Czech allusions that would charm Kafka. “Your brain a beehive” and “honey tastes like blood,” he writes in “Bagatelle for György Ligeti, Eternal Light & Honeycomb.” I love the buzz and blood of this book. —Chard deNiord This is a fascinating, disquieting book whose ghostly narratives emerge from tenuous connections between statements, between words, as well as between words and the page’s negative space. Ineluctably conditioned by the very writing of them, histories of walks along Prague streets, of places where the poet eats or drinks, have become forms of desire. Light Reading’s opening line, “what you cried when you came from the womb is your name,” reveals an intuition of experience that constitutes a radical departure from In Memory of Fire, the prior collection by Stephan Delbos. Midway through the new volume the equally laconic “Why Writing” makes this observation: “they made our names of words.” To be human is to be suffused by language. And to write is the most human act, which brings us to fullness. Naming allows us to belong, yet the poet, the artist, who makes marks in the world fashions our existential paradox; inscription throws the self into flux. Delbos has crafted a poetry of ideas. Hi

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981 views22 pages

Light Reading by Stephan Delbos Book Preview

Light Reading, the first full-length poetry collection from poet, playwright, translator and editor Stephan Delbos, ranges from micro-minimalist poems to all-encompassing lyric declarations and metatextual litanies. The book’s first section, “Light Reading,” begins with an aubade and ends with a lullaby. In between, these short poems grapple with the marks words make on existence, exploring themes of language and memory, and confronting the work of poets and thinkers including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, John Milton, Jack Kerouac, William Bronk and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The second section of the book, “Bagatelles for Typewriter,” includes an elegy for Czech playwright and President Václav Havel, and poems inspired by the composers Philip Glass, György Ligeti and Johnny Rotten, among others. These open-ended lyrical narratives playfully explode the minimalist complexity of “Light Reading.” The book’s third section, “Arrangements,” is a series of creative directives for poetry that takes metatext to the max. Light Reading exhibits a startling formal range and a delightful eclecticism of poetic thought. Fragmentary, elliptical, and aphoristic, Stephan Delbos’ lyrics resonate beyond the page. As he notes, “language / outlives us.” If American poet Bill Knott whispers below these cool surfaces, so too do Celan and Ritsos, allowing Delbos the “Ghost notes” of his interior yet cosmopolitan voice. There’s warmth too (“here / hang / your / shells / shadows / shame”) and playfulness (“I carry music like Samson / in my beard and later / on my Samsung”). Light Reading, as the title suggests, is breezy and prophetic, mirror and depth, and pleasurably “drunk on wordscotch.” —Michael Waters Lorine Niedecker called her work a “condensery,” and the term is equally appropriate to the poetry of Stephan Delbos in his brilliant Light Reading. His minimalist pieces are charged with rare wit and intelligence, his bagatelles are as poised and surprising as those of Bartok, and his tongue-in-teach suggestions for his fellow poets turn out, ironically, to be wise advice despite themselves (“A poem controlled by someone else / A someone who doesn’t speak your language”). According to Delbos, “What is worth believing / is impossible / to believe / and really only / that will save you…” And you better believe it. —Norman Finkelstein The poems in Light Reading interrupt silence with whispers, occasional shouts, erasures’ spaces. Delbos’ lines resonate with startling spontaneity and sprezzatura. A master minimalist, he writes with risible daring and poignance. His mind’s at poetic play throughout these refreshing poems, leaping with erudition, oneiric strangeness, and Czech allusions that would charm Kafka. “Your brain a beehive” and “honey tastes like blood,” he writes in “Bagatelle for György Ligeti, Eternal Light & Honeycomb.” I love the buzz and blood of this book. —Chard deNiord This is a fascinating, disquieting book whose ghostly narratives emerge from tenuous connections between statements, between words, as well as between words and the page’s negative space. Ineluctably conditioned by the very writing of them, histories of walks along Prague streets, of places where the poet eats or drinks, have become forms of desire. Light Reading’s opening line, “what you cried when you came from the womb is your name,” reveals an intuition of experience that constitutes a radical departure from In Memory of Fire, the prior collection by Stephan Delbos. Midway through the new volume the equally laconic “Why Writing” makes this observation: “they made our names of words.” To be human is to be suffused by language. And to write is the most human act, which brings us to fullness. Naming allows us to belong, yet the poet, the artist, who makes marks in the world fashions our existential paradox; inscription throws the self into flux. Delbos has crafted a poetry of ideas. Hi

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LIGHT READING

STEPHAN DELBOS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York


Light Reading
by Stephan Delbos
Copyright © 2018

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without


the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza


Cover Art: Josef Sudek
Svàty Vit, 1928
Photograph © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-320-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951452

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21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10


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Contents:


I: Light Reading 11
II: Bagatelles for Typewriter 61
III: Arrangements 81




LIGHT READING





I: Light Reading



what you cried when you came from the womb is your name

§Aubade

13
(shakes speaker)

§Poet

14
and just like that
I was wearing Johnnie Walker’s hat

§Last Night (Tone Loathing)

15
dirty
angular
face

§Lust

16
she said I won’t
forget you it
sounded like a threat

§Late Sooth

17
a hole with a

hole in it

she wrote

a kind
of toast

to
mourning

§Wrought Light

18
cannot believe I have lived
here so long

§Earth Forty

19
keytar & flowbee see
anything can be poetry

§‘80s Ars

20
if only
all life
were so
simple
here
hang
your
shells
shadows
shame

§On Coatracks

21
shapely

breaks

easily

§Umbrella Lines

22
I think I
will still
try
to survive

Darkness
-’s static
soundtracks me

§Twenty-first Century Man

23
impossibly

yes

§Luck

24

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