The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein | Page 4

darknesses around my limbs
And warm luster.
I want to wander far
behind the hills of the earth.
Deep beyond the gliding oceans.
Past
the singing winds.
There I'll meet the silent stars.
They carry space
through time.
And live at the death of being.
And among them are
gray,
Isolated things.
Faded movement
Of worlds long decayed.

Lost sound.
Who can know that.
My blind dream watches far
from earthly wishes.
III
The following poems can be divided into three groups. One combines
fantastic, half-playful images: The Sad Man, Rubbers, Capriccio, The
Patent-Leather Shoe, A Barkeeper's Coarse Complaint. (First appeared
in Aktion, in Simplicissimus, in March, Pan and elsewhere). Pleasure in
what is purely artistic is unmistakable.
Examples: The Athlete: in the background is a demonstration of a view
of the world. The Athlete... means that it is terrible that a man must also
intellectually move his bowels.--Rubbers: a man wearing rubbers is
different without them.
IV

The earliest poetry forms a second group:
Twilight
The intention is to eliminate the difference between time and space in
favor of the idea of poetry. The poems want to represent the effect of
twilight on the landscape.
In this case the unity of time is necessary to a certain degree. The unity
of space is not required, therefore not observed. In twelve lines the
twilight is represented on a pond, tree, field, somewhere... its effect on
the appearance of a young man, a wind, a sky, two cripples, a poet, a
horse, a lady, a man, a young boy, a woman, a clown, a baby-carriage,
some dogs is represented visually. (The expression is poor, but I can
find nothing better)
The author of the poem does not want to portray a landscape that is
thought to be real. The poetic art has the advantage over painting of
offering "ideal" images. That means--in respect to the Twilight: the fat
boy who uses the big pond as a toy, and the two cripples on crutches in
the field and the woman on the city street who was knocked down by a
cart-horse in the half-darkness, and the poet who, filled with desperate
longing, is thinking in the evening (probably looking through a
skylight), and the circus clown in the gray rear building who is sighing
as he puts on his boots in order to arrive punctually at the performance,
in which he must be funny--all these can produce a poetic "picture,"
although they cannot be composed like a painting. Most still deny that,
and for that reason recognize, for example, in the "Twilight" and
similar pictures nothing but a mindless confusion of strange
performances. Others believe, incorrectly, that these kinds of "ideal"
pictures are possible in painting (for example, the Futurist mish mash).
The intention, furthermore, to grasp the reflex of things

directly--without superfluous reflections. Lichtenstein knows that the
man is not stuck to the window, but stands behind it. That the
baby-carriage is not screaming, but the child in the baby- carriage.
Because he can only see the baby-carriage, he writes: the


baby-carriage cries. It would have been untrue lyrically had he written:
a man stands behind a window.
By chance, it is conceptually also not untrue: a boy plays with a pond.
A horse stumbles over a lady. Dogs swear. Certainly one must laugh in
an odd way when one learns to see: that a boy actually uses a pond as a
toy. How horses have a helpless way of stumbling... how human dogs
express their rage...
Sometimes the representation of reflection is important. Perhaps a poet
goes mad--makes a deeper impression than--a poet stares stiffly ahead--
Something else compelling in the poem: fear and things that resemble
reflection, like: all men must die... or: I am only a little book of
pictures... that will not be discussed here.
V
That Twilight and other poems take things strangely (The comic is
experienced tragically. The representation is "grotesque"), to notice the
unbalanced, incoherent nature of things, arbitrariness, confusion... is
not, in any case, the characteristic of "style." Proof is: Lichtenstein
writes poems in which the "grotesque" disappears, without notice,
behind the "ungrotesque."
Other differences between older poems (for example, Twilight) and
later ones (for example, Fear) in the same style are detectable. One
might observe that ever increasing idiosyncratic reflections about
landscape clearly break through. Certainly not without artistic purpose.
VI
The third group consists of the poems of Kuno Kohn.
Alfred Lichtenstein
(Wilmersdorf)
The Athlete

A man walked back and forth in his torn slippers
In the small room

He inhabited.
He thought about the events
About which he was
informed by the evening paper.
And sadly yawned, the way only that
man yawns
Who has read much that is strange--
And the thought
suddenly overcame him,
Like a timid person who gets gooseflesh,

And the way the person who stuffs himself
Starts to burp,
Like a
mother in labor:
The great yawn might perhaps be a sign,
A nod
from fate,
To