Dear Owl
you have big eyes
feathers that stick in all different directions
you wake up
...
He walks around walks around
DJ Spinoza
He looks like a circle
from which sticks out a snorkel
...
DJ Spinoza
is a mighty wrestler
His angel is a book
He dreams he climbs
...
Now the Lord said to DJ Spinoza,
Get out of your country!
And DJ Spinoza said to the Lord,
What country are you talking about, Lord?
...
When his father lay dying
DJ Spinoza knelt before him in goatskins
and pretended he was someone else.
...
Now the Lord God said to DJ Spinoza,
Baruch, are you there?
And DJ Spinoza replied to the Lord God,
Here I am!
...
2.
When Morris Imposternak throws his round shield
Down during, say, the battle of Philippi or something
Who knows what poems, what true propositions
Will rise out of the sticky, fragrant loam?
...
3.
When Morris Imposternak fell in love
The woman he loved didn't love him in return
And so he picked up a violin and said:
You, violin, respond to my application
...
6.
Do not love
It is possible that nothing is true anyway
That we live in a forest of begriffons
...
8.
Let us ask a question: Where have you been,
Morris Imposternak? Whom have you lied to
Again, and when? Among what arms, what legs
Have you remembered
...
9.
Morris Imposternak hears the sounds of music.
What does it say, music,
This most abstract and emotional of all arts?
It is strange that the arts still exist, isn't it?
...
12.
In a universe renowned for its simplicity
Composed, as it was, of P and ¬P
There lived a philosopher who became a painter
He painted portraits of philosophers
...
Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979. Lives in New York but makes long sojourns in Europe. Writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and macaronicism. His second book of poetry, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages; the critic Marjorie Perloff describes it as “zany, profound, hilarious, imaginative, and technically brilliant.” In Germany, his chapbook Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies was translated by Uljana Wolf as Auf tritt Morris Imposternak, verfolgt von Ironien for SuKuLTuR. As translator and scholar, Ostashevsky specializes in OBERIU, the 1920s-30s Leningrad avant-garde group led by Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. He teaches in the Liberal Studies Program of New York University but was a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow in 2013, when these poems were recorded.)
Dear Owl
Dear Owl
you have big eyes
feathers that stick in all different directions
you wake up
your panties are funny
You hear
the sounds words make
as they plead for life
that's all that remains
of the language of language
O Owl
among leaves
what is this forest
of "letters," black light
of unintelligible suns
I cannot see
who I am
who you are
the difference between good and evil
the end of human desire
how to tell the truth
and why
Is this my life
Are you in it