THE BOMBED GENERATION

Bivouacking among nameless bards, sounding boards transfixed by twinges of toothache,

i summon monsters masked by pain and anguish under bombardment

skilful tightrope walkers on the strings of enchantment, or disenchantment,

intermittent comet stars.

Shunning wishes of the Maurizio Costanzo Show,

like eighties vates, we take to the streets to sing,

and to endure charges like animals in battery,

never surrendering to the scheming

created by statesmen alien to all embarrassment.

OUT OF ISCHEMS

Try, once in your life, to stop living outside each ischeme,

without constant ink interruptions to the vein’s phoneme,

so that the western crisis becomes an occipital crisis,

with the saving of ants increase the consumption of cicadas.

As you stopped reading, at least stop writing

‘public’ that doesn’t exist and forces us to sell books like vacuum cleaners,

Porta a Porta, where Novi Aldi goes on Vespa and returns Bompiani,

after abandoning Theseus’ ship, in whiff of hurricanes.

This is the century, or the millennium, of the professional artist

not knowing how to do anything, you are content to remain a figurehead,

among the various shrewd actors and actresses of the publishing market

willing to give their children to a rom in exchange for an inch of shelf space

in the prestigious Feltrinelli bookshop in your town

you don’t want to stop living out of ischems, c’aggia fa?

I DON’T CARE

For the last twenty years or so, ‘I don’t care’ has been back in fashion,

herds of brainless constipated people, all, in search of the rehabilitierung of ego,

brick by brick, in the black shirt of ignorance organising raids,

with the outcome of ending up dead, a mosquito bite away, on couch Freud’s.

The new mass, without any strength, waiting for an acceleration,

placed under scrutiny receives its models from television magazines,

moved by a self-esteem disproportionate to its actual neural entity,

ite, missa est, giving extreme unction, being a cancerous mass.

Talking to the average italian is like talking to Louis XVI,

an anencephaly patient who dreams of residing in the Medici court,

living in Masters of Florence, the Renaissance soap opera,

forcing you to surrender to the Magone as Lucius Chinchus Alimentus.

With the new ‘I don’t care’ generations we should build democracy,

stuff of exterminating homo sapiens sapiens with an attack of epizootics,

we will rely on a detailed deliberative referendum of protest,

forcing our fellow-citizens to use their heads.

ASSAULT ON THE OVENS

Panem et circensens is asked of the contemporary artist,

playing the clown at readings grants 15 minutes of impromptu success,

they read kilometres of verse, written in half an hour, with a shrewd attitude,

they would also declaim verses in arabic if Isis established a Caliphate in Palermo.

They read, read, read, all the flour of their infinite sack

and we, with our gags on, to be subjected to their dribbling to end up in checkmate,

the queen, bored, is undecided whether to fuck the king or a horse,

and the contemporary reads, reads, without allowing us an interval,

without allowing himself an interval, between one bullshit and another, without ever being satisfied

he has to bring home the bread-roll, hey, as an artist who boasts of being overpaid.

THE BARBARIAN AND THE PRINCESS

To you who observe with your bistro eyes my discontents

you defuse me with a smile, you neutralise me with a love

as enduring as a Compact Fluorescent Lamp,

becoming aeriform, neon, argon, krypton,

maybe it’s the krypton that deactivates my Superman cravings,

climbing up my spine with catlike paws,

dissuading me from gobbling, from drinking, from brawling, from stopping writing.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

i keep wearing white tank tops in my black underwear

not washing the dishes, banging on the keys,

better than washing the keys and banging on the dishes,

i kidnapped you on a raid on the coasts of Gaeta,

enchanted by you, late-modern Circe,

capable of turning pigs into men,

pig’s heart is equal to the human heart,

you alone have understood this, in twenty years, with your insulinous carefreeness,

with your insecurities, with your premenstrual breakdowns, with your questioning face,

always capable of disconcerting me, square mime destined to go bald,

without replacing me.

Princeza romana, eu sou seu bárbaro,

yet without being able to dedicate Odi barbare to you,

i am not equipped to hate anyone, or to mix metres,

– what shall we do, half a metre?- better my aptitude for duelling,

Ro rocamboling, half Cyrano de Bergerac and half Socrates,

i’m convinced that you prefer me whole, and long-life,

not having the ambition of the modern woman

to turn her man into an asshole.

AT THE TAVERN OF SOLID LOVE

My little love, solid, you, today, fell

and i was not there to support you, with my aggressive biceps

of a barbarian from the northern forests, my face painted blue,

lying in the spasmodic berserksgangr of drinking from the skulls of the vanquished,

it all begins with a trembling, chattering of teeth and a feeling of cold,

immense rage and a desire to assault the enemy.

My little love, fragile, you, today, fell,

and there is a tavern behind our house, all brianzola, your new world,

there is a tavern that serves a hundred and a hundred types of risotto

to spread on your wounds and on your skinned knees,

where i, imperative man, can still interpret every amber darkness

in your wise child’s eyes, manipulating the kaleidoscope of your irises,

voluntarily uncovering my flank to the dagger of your arctic lucidity.

If not a tavern, our love, resembles us: we eat and live,

remunerating each other, victories and defeats, hôtellerie, we bustle and eat,

until the innkeeper Godan, the god of stubborn ‘poets’, slams a mug of mead on the table

invite us to dance at Walhalla, Mocambo a contrario, dance far away, to the end of the worlds,

you will return to the simple freshness of your sea, you wandering caetan siren of sand,

and to me the fog-damp earth of the valley without ascents or descents will not weigh on my zinc.

In the ancient taverns of solid love continue to mix fog and sea-water,

outside thunderstorms, lightning and thunder, liquefied by the cloudburst everything is drying out,  

and we, we eat and live, we bustle and eat, sheltered, in our reserve of happiness,

aware that, hovering in the air, in the long run,

the misty ice crystals will flow into the sea.

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni and Kolektivne NSEAE with Divinafollia. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L’Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and is included several times in the major international literature magazine, Gradiva. His verses are translated into 25 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology) [https://kolektivnenseae.wordpress.com/].

Seeing Four Times

 1-

Hopper boarding house:

lights on behind each

window, a story in every room.

 2-

Hands framed like O’Keeffe’s

in black and white. Age spotted

and arthritic now. Two handled

coffee cup nearby, steaming.

 3-

Burchfield snowscapes surreal

as sun behind snow burdened

trees. All the walls inside

papered with dreams.

 4-

O’Keeffe’s night sky.

clouds over the desert.

Windows open to let

the stars in.

Seeing Five Times

 1-

Loud noise startles-

crows rise from

Van Gogh’s fields.

 2-

After the shipwreck-

Turner recreates

the storm.

 3-

Light clarified-

Monet’s out of focus

flowers.

 4-

Shadows brushed by light

at sunrise-new eyes

are needed.

 5-

Inside the cathedral:

sunlight through stained

glass. Hopkins’ pied beauty.

Seeing Six Times

 1-

Windblown sun against

window glass, a study

for a landscape.

 2-

An arrangement of summer

squash on a picnic table

by size and height;

almost art.

 3-

Rock formations where

mountains abruptly end.

Rising mist envelopes

lost climbers. Nowhere to go.

 4-

Felled trees carved

Into animal heads.

A man with a chainsaw.

Making art.

 5-

Dawn in the mountains.

Fog layers a lake.

Last night’s rain still

on trees.

 6-

Landscape with sunset.

low slate gray clouds

underscored by dayglo

red on the hills, windows

reflect bits of color.

Seeing Seven Times

 1-(Durant)

Last flourish of sun

over white mountains.

Shadows cloud still

water. Nothing moves.

Not even the light.

 2-(Hokusai)

Snowcapped Mt. Fuji.

Red sun sinks.

The sea on fire.

 3-(Cropsey)

Fading clouds last

reflective glow on still

water, sun tainted evening

mists drift towards shore.

4-(Hokusai)

Draws perfect circles,

one inside the other.

Then the Great Wave.

 5-(Church)

Low ridge of black

clouds. The whiteness

of a snow peak. A full

moon rising.

 6-(Hokusai)

Musing. Travelers hike

curving paths bearing

burdens on their backs,

where one trail ends,

another begins.

 7-(Self-Portrait)

Deeply furrowed flesh.

Collapsing facial lines.

Tired eyes still laughing.

The White and the Blue and the Black Three Times

 1-

The sky bleeds 

where sun meets

the sea

The slow tide

of night that

follows after

 2-

Lilacs in full bloom.

The white and the blue.

A purple Iris border;

Spring’s tone poem

 3-

Before the storm:

dead calm of still

black night

The island drawing

lightning from the sky

Wind chimes sound

the alarm

Les Preludes: Ted and Sylvia, One Each

 1-

Fluctuating sea breezes,

sky changing from

blue to gray to black;

hawk in the rain

 2-

Dead fall amid winter

trees; matted grass where

the deer lie down

world with no possible escape

 – Victor Serge

afternoons flip by like 

well …  afternoons 

what else is there to be said

 bygones be bygones 

perhaps

write along

it’s saturday 

oh no

it is tuesday 

where did the words go

he said

making love is not a sound bite

she said

want to lay a bet

evening

fine dinner

wine glass empty

evening

walk along the Seine

she cut the roses

he cut down the forest

together

the two of them

had an unhappy life together 

Grant Guy is a Winnipeg, Canada, theatre maker and poet. He has 6 books published and his poems and satories have been published internationally online and as hard copy. He was the 2004 recipient of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Award of Distinction and the 2015 Winnipeg Arts Council’s Making A Difference Reward.

Today’s poems are very reductive. They reflect more of the micro theatre pieces I began during the time of COVID.  In the micro theatre pieces the object or the gesture was the event.  In today’s poems the words are the event. Each word and/or line can be connected as pieces of shards by the reader.

 

Mother Courage and Her Children is a theatre of the absurd canonizing nihilistic expressionism in modern European drama through the nebulous and meteoric phenomenon that crusading battlements feed people better as Marxist dialectics of warfare polity enterprise. Modernist playwright and avant-gardist theatrical theoretician sheds light in the evolution of constant revolutionizing of production, the uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, and the everlasting agitation and agony. Anna Fierling’s femininity, womanhood and motherhood is marred by the deterrent of trauma, violence, famine, poverty, bloodshed and civil wars, massacres and genocides and finally the bereavement of family members to geopolitical crises. Kattrin is a dumb disability rape victim of beleaguered Catholic regiment and her life is doomed to the brink of death at the expanse of messianic heraldry to awaken the Ingolstadt community and Utretch neighbourhood against the impending imperilment.

In context of postmodernism, post marxism, post communism, post stalinism, post fascism, postnazism the post Brechtian epic theatre is a treasure hunt of excavating and critiquing geopolitical tensions and conflicts amid globalization, liberalization, privatization, internationalization and sanction-counter sanction policies. Terrains and frontiers of capitalistic mercenary profiteering warfare politics usher satire of Mother Courage and Her Children to be cornerstone significance in contemporary legacy of Israel and Gaza or Russia and Ukraine. However, Mother Courage’s stony heartedness disentangles and estranges the stance of motherhood for preservation stake of survivalist livelihood; coldheartedness diminishes in grief stricken soul and freezing heart to glimpse the postmortem view of Swiss Cheese’s dead corpse. Resourcefulness, resilience, craftiness, perspicacity and intuitiveness deserves heartfelt kudos and laurel accolades as a gendered quester and displacement refugee of racial and ethnic migrant to spatiotemporal dystopian apocalypse. Exilic Brecht’s rage and fury was subjected to the temperamental vehemence of the then World War II Nazi German Holocaust. Atisemitism forges a cascade of hatred, oppression, antipathy, intolerance, inhumanity and barbarism towards Jewishness. Perpetual horror and terror of Nazi Germany substantively mirrors excruciating endangerment of Mother Courage as foretold by the tragic death chronicles of her Swiss Cheese and Eiliff. In Mother Courage and Her Children, Kattrin symbolically  resurrects the foreshadowing of Anne Frank’s afterthought that “Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude”. Through Kattrin’s heroic demise and sacrificial martyrdom Brecht spotlights the Marxist resistance and Marxist revolution. Her dumbness is transformatively changed to the libertarian human voices from the performativity of forces which render silence. Destruction and desolation of entrenched warfares afterall allegorizes the wartime backdrop of the theatrical production. Furthermore, Mother Courage’s staking of autonomy and individuality vis a-vis establishment and enfranchisement for her labour, worth, power and profit parallels resistance and struggles of the serfs and proletariat of Nazi Germany.  

Audiences and theatre critics speculate anti war play today as a reflection of warzones wherein mother courages are locked into the closets of detention centres throughout certainly. Bold and radical theatres and productions stage the modern European drama Mother Courage and Her Children as theatrical revue. Suffering and survival of the battlefields in the war frontiers of geopolitical disruptions lead to victimhood from war casualties. Dramatis’ personae of Mother Courage’s pragmatism engulfs her sentimentality into obscurity through the let bygones be bygones realism of continuity with the trade. Moreover, the future and safety of Eiliff and Kattrin are of paramount importance as revealed by the brunt of conservancy of the wagon. Mother Courage’s socioeconomic status facilitates her transcendentalist redemption from economic encumbrance and financial bankruptcy. However, “when the war gives you all you earn, one day it may claim something in return” is denunciation of the sergeant starkly apparent in the pawnship of Swiss Cheese’s life. Formidable survivor Anna Fierling is much more a character of the petty bourgeois class evolving into the exemplar premise of socialist realism with the coalescence of the Cold War as anti-capital and anti-war epic theatre. Afterall, Mother Courage’s polarized dual personality as both heartless speculator and tormented maternal figure are entrenched with inexpressibly incompatible paradoxical gulf between herself and the world. Anna Fierling’s modern disfigurement foreshadows the relationships between commodities, money and the marketplace that perverts human relationships and is ultimately inimical to life. Her wagon is a hallmark symbol of profiteering capitalistic enterprise of a doggerel and bloody warfare as well as unfolkloric and unsentimental victimhood of traumatic survival. 

Bertolt Brecht as a precursor of anti war epic theater heralds the harbinger of impending second world war and the dangers associated with victimization in traits of Solomon, Julius Caesar, Socrates and St. Martin. Although these personages are heroically admirable for their humane virtues, however, they are cowardly and despicable for being preys of wartime. The Brechtian epic theatre focuses dialectical social critique rather than tragicomedy to educate critical faculties for the reception of alienated point of view and detached perspectives. Willing suspension of disbelief  is somewhat polar opposites to Brecht’s engendering of illusion.

Further Reading, References, Endnotes and Podcasts

Belvoir 2015 production of Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht Translation Michael Gow Music Composition Stefan Gregory Director Eamon Flack Notes for Teachers, pp: 1-23

https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/mothercourage/historical-context/

Rational Irrationality

Review Paper on Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht

The Death of Tragedy George Steiner pp. 1-40

Konstantin Stanislavski An Actor Prepares pp. 1-20

Mother Courage and Her Children On Stage and Screen by Ralf Remshardt, pp. 1-10

Mother Courage and Her Children Study Guide Bertold Brecht in a new version with Peter Hinton a national Arts Center English Theatre Company Manitoba Theatre Centre (Winnipeg) Coproduction, pp. 1-28

Previously published in Children, Churches and Daddies.

Deb Hatcher

The last day that I saw Debbie Hatcher, she was just 15 years old. Slender and pretty and dressed in a skirt that hugged her hips, she was cute as a button. She had shoulder length light brown hair and a gold herringbone locket she’d received for her fifteenth birthday. She wore it literally everywhere; she was so proud of being in love with a boy who would bestow such a precious gift on her.

We were standing in the school library, in the Ds, somewhere between Durant and Dante, searching for a likely subject for a book report, when, madly impulsive, I approached her as if in a dream and kissed her lips. She was startled at first, but when the shock had disappeared, she let her guard down and kissed me back. I had known Deb since grade school, but only fantasized about her as a sort of forbidden treasure, lovely to admire from a distance, but strictly unapproachable.

Here I was, Tim Meese, not yet 16, and kissing a girl for the first time. And what a girl! I silently congratulated myself for starting at the very top of the social pyramid. She leaned into me and I into her, until we were both quite lost. At length, old, old Mrs. Kroger — she must have been at least 50 — the school librarian, sneaked down the aisle and coughed peremptorily. We instantly separated, embarrassed to have been found out. Although this was my initial foray into kissing, it was clearly not the first time that Deb had been kissed. She was far too expert at it to be a novice.

We glanced at Mrs. Kroger, to assess the level of trouble we were in, but she smiled her secret smile and withdrew. I felt supercharged, and Deb seemed similarly affected. She leaned close and whispered to meet her after school at her house; I hastily agreed. And what of the necklace-giving boyfriend? It turned out that his family had moved to the coast two weeks before and so at least he was no longer in contention for Deb’s affections. But I didn’t know this yet.

After lunch, I spied Deb in the corridor between classes, walking with her friends. I smiled at her, but she looked right through me. I blinked. Weren’t we inexorably linked forever, having tasted one another’s lips and even shared a breath? Had I only imagined our reconnoitering in the library? I shook my head and proceeded on to class.

After school let out, I anxiously plodded the three blocks to Maple Street, where Deb’s house stood. When I arrived, I knocked at the door and Mrs. Hatcher, a stay-at-home mom, which nearly all moms were back in the day, invited me in to wait for her daughter. We engaged in small talk and she plied me with pretzels, chips and Pepsis. Gazing about the living room, I spotted a photo of Deb and Jason, the boy who’d given her the locket. I didn’t know him well and stared at him disconsolately, enviously.

Mrs. Hatcher went on to tell me that Jason’s father had taken a job with an aircraft manufacturer in Los Angeles, and so that was the last they would see of Jason. She didn’t seem at all unhappy at the prospect, condemning him as “too progressive,” whatever that meant. Mrs. Hatcher remembered me from second grade, when her daughter and I had been matched up to perform the minuet in some stale elementary school production of a 200-year-old play. She inquired politely how my dancing was commencing. I told her that I was more into The Twist and The Mashed Potato these days, and she sniffed.

After quite a long time, the telephone jangled off the hook and Mrs. Hatcher snatched it up. She listened for some time, drew a sharp breath and said, “I’ll be there.” She looked stricken and then stared off into space for an interminable moment, and finally turned to me and said, in a choked voice, “You’d better go home, Tim,” and she disappeared into another room. I quietly let myself out.

The telephone call and Mrs. Hatcher’s behavior was a mystery to me, and I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t until the next day at school, when word leaked out. Deb Hatcher was dead. She had copped a ride on an upperclassman’s motorcycle and there had been an accident. Deb, unlike the driver, didn’t have a helmet and had suffered terminal injuries when she fell from the bike and struck her head on the pavement. The driver suffered only minor injuries.

It gave me a weird, eerie, ghostly feeling to know that I was the last boy to ever kiss Deb Hatcher. She’d had her whole life before her: additional boyfriends, a husband, children of her own, a career, perhaps. She was smart; no telling how far she might have gone. And, just maybe, she would have gone there with me. They offered a sort of rudimentary grief counseling at the school and they dedicated the yearbook to Deb and one other boy, who’d died from leukemia. I didn’t see the grief counselor and I didn’t buy the yearbook. I didn’t need the glossy photo to remember Deb. I attended the funeral. They had a closed casket.

Voracious Time

Time is a beast which no one can slay

Time’s moving forward with no delay

Time is a river that cannot be dammed

Time won’t be stayed by the mightiest hand

Time is an appetite always unsated

Time is never destroyed or created

Time is an enemy never defeated 

Time is experience never repeated

Time swallows all and nothing escapes it

Time never changes we cannot erase it

Time is the thing that makes us all equals

Time happens once without any sequels