After Rilke

by Mark Goldstein

After Rilke is the culmination of more than five years work. I began thinking about the sounds of words (rather than their meanings) the summer of 2001 while reading from bpNichol’s whimsical translations of both Catullus and Apollinaire. It was these works that got me going, opened my mind to other possibilities. However, it was Louis Zukofsky’s "Catullus" that asked me to put pen to paper. I’m unsure when Rilke’s "The Voices" entered in, but it was early on. Only later did Spicer begin to help me re-arrange the furniture – the Martians have been with me ever since. As you know, we are the “future poets” that Jack spoke of and this work is meant to correspond with his. “All first person pronouns have a shared pulse. Here, Rilke’s original poems are being translated by Goldstein (and the epistolary Martians) a la Spicer’s After Lorca. The author is soaking German for its English. By sound. Did he say what I thought he said? Spider? Milky? A homage to both Spicer and Rilke, this sequenc