Bird

November 11, 2017 by A.B. Spellman

Editor’s Note: WordPress typography requires a re-up at the top of this poem in order to reach the height intended by the author.

Bird

so swooped bird on that solo
flight along the verge
there in the Famous
Door’s smoky dark
above the tinny percussion
of ice against glass
flying over
the genius swing of max & miles
he lifted koko
now’s the time so high
we could not hear death’s
riffs among his phrases

(how did he know to blow these truths?
this way of making every note
for the first time & in the tempo
of discovery is beyond the voice
of the bebop traveler who casts
these lines in defense of the blue)

bird’s blues flooded his world
informed the conversations
of military tourists who cruised
52nd street in search of one
last naked woman to rub against
before boating back to war
it limned the brooding profile
of the small sad woman who waited
to take him home

***
there was exaltation in his horn
even after he burned the doorways
of his loves & mad brave bud
cursed him from the keyboard &
frigid death thickened around him
so no breath of light leaked through

the walls of the city prayed to it
bird lives they preached to the night
bird lives bird lives bird lives

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Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA