De Nederlandse dichter en schrijver Michel van der Plas werd geboren op 23 oktober 1927 in Den Haag. Zie ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2006 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2007 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2009.xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Uit Warschau

Het kerkhof van een getto. Stenen. Stenen.
Gezichten die niet zeggen wat ze menen.

Hangende handen. Lusteloze voeten.
Ze waden door een eeuwig puin. Ze moeten.

Maar op een zolderkamer gaan ze leven.
Vertellen. Menselijk bewegen. Even.

Ze worden vogels, fladderen en wiegen.
Tot aan 't plafond. Dan weifelen ze. Liegen.

Schrompelen samen, vallen en verkillen.
Lichamen die niet leven wat ze willen.

Regentesselaan

Wat heeft ons op die morgen toch wel mogen

doen lopen langs de Regentesselaan,

waar ons de blaren om de oren vlogen?

Waar kwamen we in 's hemelsnaam vandaan?

Hoe dan ook, er kwam een mannetje aan

waardoor je blik opeens werd aangezogen,

een en al zwarte hoed en zwarte ogen,

voorzichtig schuifelend, - en jij bleef staan.

Kloos, zei je, toen hij bij het hoekje kwam -

een hoopje mens, maar toch een zo geachte,

dat je, eerbiedig, op een afstand, wachtte,

en, ongezien door hem, je hoed afnam.

Daar ging een god in 't diepst van zijn gedachten

naar P. van Haasdrecht voor een half ons ham.

Michel van der Plas (Den Haag, 23 oktober 1927)

De Albanees-Amerikaanse schrijfster en actrice Masiela Lusha werd geboren op 23 oktober 1985 in Tirana. Zie ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2009.

Vienna 

Vienna’s yellow palace rests above a cloud

Of chilled Hungarian lights,

But the gardens are still red and violet

And the three rocks still carry my wishes

From springtides before.

The snow still shines like a field

Of angel satin dressing history.

The garden maze of frosted Sylvester

Chills my worries solid

So that I may break myself

Apart and away and twirl

Like easy snow, my joy,

Clear above the rounded hills.

This Vienna! My love letter

To her time will ride the

Syllables of drawn memories

Into fields and museums,

Cathedrals and music and smiles,

Swans dressed as ballerinas.

My Vienna, my youth

Of clouded breaths, and mittens

And Weinnachtsmann the jolly German giant

Offering chocolate upon chocolate on Christmas Eve.

The mornings after, my golden schnitzels

And toasted chestnuts and steaming punch and walks

Through Stephansplatz.

Her Sunday bells call forth an art

Of celebrated Strauss and violins

And tall maestros

(Lean measures of physical music)

All giants, all play in my heart.

I cradle the dream in my ear.

This beauty I posses with time

Calls through me like a river

Glabrous in all its long glory,

Raising swans and lilies over the shore

And I let the river—a network

Of Europe

Work and flow through the values

Of my memory and pride

And with one frothy sigh,

I let the blue Danube

Finally escape my eyes.

Masiela Lusha (Tirana, 23 oktober 1985)

De Amerikaanse schrijver Augusten Xon Burroughs werd geboren op 23 oktober 1965 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Zie ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2009.

Uit: A Wolf at the Table. A Memoir of My Father

“Sitting in my high chair, I held a saltine cracker up to my eye and peered through one of the tiny holes, astonished that I could see so much through such a small opening. Everything on the other side of the kitchen seemed nearer when viewed through this little window.

The cracker was huge, larger than my hand. And through this pinprick hole I could see the world.

I brought the cracker to my lips, nibbled off the corners, and mashed the rest into a dry, salty dust. I clapped, enchanted.

The hem of my mother’s skirt. A wicker lantern that hangs from the ceiling, painting the walls with sliding, breathing shadows. A wooden spoon and the hollow knock as it strikes the interior of a simmering pot. My high chair’s cool metal tray and the backs of my legs stuck to the seat. My mother twisting the telephone cord around her fingers, my mouth on the cord, the deeply satisfying sensation of biting the tight, springy loops.

I was one and a half years old.

These fragments are all that remain of my early childhood. There are no words, just sounds: my mother’s breathy humming in my ear, her voice the most familiar thing to me, more known than my own hand. My hand still surprises me at all times; the lines and creases, the way the webbing between my fingers glows red if I hold up my hand to block the sun. My mother’s voice is my home and when I am surrounded by her sounds, I sleep.

The thickly slippery feel of my bottle’s rubber nipple inside my mouth. The shocking, sudden emptiness that fills me when it’s pulled away.

My first whole memory is this: I am on the floor. I am in a room. High above me is my crib, my homebox, my goodcage, but it’s up, up, up. High in the air, resting upon stilts. There is a door with a knob like a faceted glass jewel. I have never touched it but I reach for it every time I am lifted.

Above my head is a fist of brightness that stings my eyes. The brightness hangs from a black line.“

Augusten Burroughs (Pittsburgh, 23 oktober 1965)

De Amerikaanse dichter, schrijver en journalist Nick Tosches werd geboren in 1949 in Newark, New Jersey. Zie ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2008 en ook mijn blog van 23 oktober 2009.

Uit: The Nick Tosches Reader

„I was eighteen or nineteen years old, working days at the Lovable Underwear Company, when I came to know the poet Ed Sanders. Ed, who twenty years later would win an American Book Award for his poetry, was then the ringleader of the notorious band The Fugs, and he also ran the Peace Eye bookstore, which at that time was on Avenue A.

    Ed had a degree in classical languages, and could read fluently in their own Greek and Latin those ancient poets that I could only understand through the gauze of translation. I had tried to teach myself Greek from the two volumes of A Reading Course in Homeric Greek that I had robbed from a divinity student a few years before, and I had taken Latin in high school; but it was beyond me to truly delve the beauties and powers of the poetry of those tongues, as Ed could. He had even studied Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    We shared, he in his erudite way and I in my unlettered fashion, a love for those ancient fragments that were the wisps of the source, the wisps of origin, the wisps of the first and truest expression of all that since had been said. And we both had dirty minds, given as much to the gutter as to the gods.

    The Lower East Side was a different place back then. It was still a neighborhood. East Thirteenth Street was still known as the Street of Silence, a name I would bestow on another Mafia stronghold, Sullivan Street, in my novel Cut Numbers. The joints were still joints. We drank a lot in those joints.

    Ed was a great guy. He was about ten years older than I, and was the first real poet to whom I showed my poetry. "Hell, man," he told me, "you're a fucking poet." As I doubt he ever realized he was my first mentor, so I doubt he ever realized what a shove forward, what a turning point, this was for me.

    That poem, which bore the title "Still/Life," and which I later invoked in my novel Trinities, is long gone. Fragments of it follow.“

Nick Tosches (Newark, 23 oktober 1949)

De Duitse dichter, schrijver en uitgever Rodja Weigand werd geboren op 23 oktober 1945 in München. Hij werd opgeleid tot betonbouwer en schrijft sinds 1963 poëzie en proza. Hij is ook de uitgever van het Landsberger Lesebuch en van dichtbundels van Paul Eluard, Jannis Ritsos, Franziska Sellwig, Elfriede Jelinek, Giorgos Seferis, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Rubén Darío, Nelly Sachs, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway en Rafael Alberti. Rodja Weigand woont in Schwifting.

Schockgefroren

trakl öffnet den raum
glas zerbricht zwischen
den schenkeln der schwester

der voyeur unter der treppe
mit brennenden augen

die herberge
eine wohnstatt
aus klebrigem sekret

und dann
kam frost

Rodja Weigand (München, 23 oktober 1945)