To John Engels

So I have been thinking a lot about human relationships, our relationships with nonhuman elements and our relationships with art. John Engels taught me to be a close-reader. I remember discussing a poem with him during my freshman year and I remember him asking me if I liked the poem or what the poem was saying. I had never thought about it that way before and I haven’t stopped thinking that way since; form and content will forever be inseparable in my opinions of art and in my opinions of life. No matter what the discussion was we never strayed far from art and what art is. Maybe it was narrow minded but maybe not, because to both of us, I think, art is or was everything; there is no division between the mundane and the sublime. Theodore Roethke said, “Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” I am not so sure I agree with this statement any longer. Art is what everything else is and it doesn’t undo anything so much as explain it. To look at a piece of art is to slow down yes, and therefore not be hasty in a particular moment. But to create art is to live a life against haste, to be paying attention.

In one of our last email exchanges Prof. Engels told me he had been reading some of his poems and wondering who this person was that wrote all of them. I sent him a translation I have been working on that was strangely related. He then compared himself to a craggy mound of Parmigian cheese.

“Manoscritti” Helle Busacca in Ottovolante

Leggo. Mi fanno male gli occhi
anche con gli occhiali.
La cateratta
e la vecchiaia, l’operazione
per carcinoma e l’infarto
karma per un fratello assassino
[...]

Leggo i diari di Helle Bussacca,
di qualcuno che esisteva forse
cinquanta o sessanta anni fa
una storia-favola di qualcuno
che ora non conosco né conobbi mai
la storia di un’estranea come leggerei
una storia di Dostoevskij o di Victor Hugo
leggo una storia storia come di qualcuno
che è stato inventato
e che a cercarlo non c’è

“Handwritten”

I read. It hurts my eyes
even with glasses. The cataract
the old age, the operations
for carcinoma and for a heart attack
karma for the murderous brother
[...]

I read the diaries of Helle Busacca
of someone that maybe existed
fifty or sixty years ago
a history a story a tale of someone
that I now do not know nor have ever known
the story of a stranger I could read like
a story of Dostoevskij or Victor Hugo
I read a story like that of someone
who was invented
and when you look for her she doesn’t exsist