Stephen Rodefer (1940-2015)
Travel well, old friend.
& Charles Olson on SR: ”
“Youthful what? Where is Rodefer, he’ll know. That damn Lycidas. Whatever else England draws upon, it’s native talent will out. The damn Lycidas! Where did Rodefer go? Youthful what?”
To the Barracks
to the list
Members, remember how I missed you when my aim was dead
and your quivers bulged with passionate intensity. That slide’s
not blue enough Maman. I cannot quiet you, though I try to
The composite vision compromises hindsight. I kant historisize
our changes. Nor can I remember them. These our leaves hunt
among gisants, pant between love and desire. Yet they are ours—
and they will be yours. In an absent tete à tete, we lose them each
morning in time’s burnt breakfast. Banana-eating baboons in Chinese
flight, perfectly ungainly in unproven parachutes–like inperfect
cuckolds. Scooters to gaol, elections to fixation, appro priation to
foresight, pricks into the closet. The pistolettes of gondeliers,
hidden, will open on all dumb rap tures, for a tuppence. As we drift
downward to arks on distended stars, and their delayed deaths—
the wings or the oars of signifying oblivion, and the muscled
burning tires at the edge of the orchard
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Very sorry to learn of this… Four Lectures was a landmark book in my life, and his self-exile & withdrawal into the margins remained a source of constant questioning for me.
Ear up, or
Get off
—in memory of Stephen Rodefer (1940-2015)
Temptations in sex, given
up approximate location. Just to stand
under the place holder your language cast
across conclusion. No one’s right, everyone
believes, more simply—one stop short
less becoming. And to sidle up
with a hoarse voice hushes
the animal. Whenever we, too,
put on those lovely gloves, over
and out these findings
a fingerling, adrift
in consensual draft, Lincoln
continental.
Taken with particular errant
accent, a likeness.
Moreover,
this may never, for once
taste anything at all: like chicken. Fear not, now
and again I say, ‘rejoice, rejoice.’ In Indiana
Diana was a huntress. Note, how
nude the word ‘tampon’ in pieces finds itself, broken
beneath the shelf of the previous stanza.
Chandelier, swing low
the party zealots
speak bakery French—
chief loaf chef bus
so sheer a kiss that parting scores, alive
nor any longer a matter of desire. Let’s re-do
in order to detour the book the outcome
rent its plural detriment. As is today
alacrity our country nonsense. He’s dead
to me, to you, a mere
dance, shadow step
away,
reflect, move over.
Just learned, sadly, of Steve’s demise in 2015. He inspired many young aspiring poets teaching creative writing at the Univ. of New Mexico, including me. After hours drinking with him was memorable, for many reasons…