Night wraps the sky

Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky (ed. Michael Almereyda) uniquely intersperses Mayakovsky's poetry and other writings (diary entries, excerpts) with others' writings about him, fictional and non-fictional, some fairly recent.

"In 150,000,000, a poem written during the American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the collossal peasant Ivan, who has 150,000,000 heads, an arm as long as the Neva River, and heels as big as the Caspian steppes, wades across the Atlantic to fight a hand-to-hand battle with a Woodrow Wilson resplendent in a top hat as high as the Eiffel Tower."

Why didn't anybody think of that during the Iraq war? Hm...

Slovenian Rimbaud

Recently I picked up a volume of poems by Srecko Kosovel, billed as a Slovenian Rimbaud - this on account of having died at the age of 22 and gaining notoriety only much later. (Rimbaud didn't die that young, but one could say he died a 'poetic' death inasmuch as he stopped writing at 19, although he lived another 20 years or so after that).

Here is one piece I quite liked, from The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srecko Kosovel.

I am

I am, and I'm not asking why;
my word is that I am here,
silently growing into this silent place
as if I were growing from peace.

Beyond the huts, the fields, beyond the gardens,
as if dreams were shining on them,
behind the narrow paths, the fences,
across the meadows stretches a restful silence.

I am, and I am not asking why,
with the huts, the fields, the gardens,
this place is like a sleeping lake
untroubled by waves.