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Unknown: KBDH San Ardo. Morton Marcus: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Morton Marcus with a special Poetry Show. Today is December 4, 2005, and on December 4, 1875, which is 130 years ago,

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the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia or part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. Tonight, I plan on reading some Rilke and reading a lot of his ‘’Letters to a Young Poet‘’, but I was very struck preparing

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for the show with a ‘’The Seventh Elegy‘’ of the ‘’Duino Elegies‘’ and I will concentrate on that. But first, in honor of Paul Couture, I will read one of his most famous short poems from his book ‘’New Poems‘’, ‘’The Panther‘’, and the poem which I

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will match up with another famous poem of his and ‘’The Panther‘’ is one of his most famous short poems. The- the panther is a panther he is looking at in the zoo in Paris, and he sees the panther in many ways as a symbol of human beings

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who are locked in their physicality and are unable to reach a higher plane of meaning, or a higher sense of existence. And so therefore the limitations is the limitation of the physical world. Here is ‘’The Panther‘’ in translation by

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Stephen Mitchell: THE PANTHER His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are

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a thousand bars; and behind the bars, the world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful stride is like a ritual dance around the center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of

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the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart, and is gone. Now, there is a poem about limitation, the limitation of

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movement, but also the limitation of any inner life, the imitation- the limitation of the pure animal. Opposed to that also from ‘’New Poems‘’, several poems beyond, is again the poet now in a museum instead of a zoo, which is an interesting

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difference right there, looking at a sculpture of Apollo, and it's called an ‘’Archaic Torso of Apollo‘’, but notice in this poem, that we're talking about the inner life, it is the inner life of this statue that catches Rilke's attention. Whereas there

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was no inner life with the panther, there is inner life that one can detect in this man-made piece of art called Apollo. And of course, it ends with the most famous lines may be in poetry of the 20th century, "Du musst Dein Leben

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ändern." And of course, you will recognize them in English translation when I read it. So here is the difference between a work of art and the pure animal. ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO.

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We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise, the curved breast

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could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten

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like a wild beast's fur: would not, for all the borders of itself burst like a star: for here, there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. And of course, poets in the 20th century, taking the lead from

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Rilke who has been a tremendous into- influence to 20th-century and now 21st-century poets, use that- that poem to show the power of art, you must change your life. Every time you come into contact with art, you must change your life. Well, I'm

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going to use this in a different way now, because we're going to go to the ‘’Duino Elegies‘’. Certainly the greatest series of poems or a long sequence of poems in a Western- if not all, poetry of the 20th century. And I'm going to go to read it for

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you, but also talk to you about it first because it relates to the two short poems I've just talked about. Rilke was tremendously tormented by the fact- and of course, this comes right out of Nietzsche, that we are limited by our bodies, we

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can never move out of this life, which in the end kills us. A very existential view of things but he was- he had to find meaning, and so what he composed was an idea that there must be another world, a world of permanence, and of course, this

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goes all the way back to Plato. In the first of these elegies, I will read this first elegy to you if I can find it here, which I'm sure we can. In the first of these elegies, the very very first line is ‘’who, if I cried out would hear me among the

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angel- angelic hierarchies, and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart, I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.‘’ Okay and that cry to the angelic orders, that is to a world of permanence and absoluteness,

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which he does not find, as a panther wandering through these bars of limitation, limitation of perception, limitation of the physical body, he comes back to in ‘’The Seventh Elegy‘’, which I am going to read. Now, obviously, it's an elegy, this

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is fairly long, it might take me around five minutes to read it. And it talks in the language of love, but what it is also doing here is talking about finally, what the poet finds as the wonder of life. And what I was struck with and why I wanted to

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read this was that our lives are becoming so difficult now, we are all looking for some kind of meaning just as Rainer Maria Rilke was. Even though the circumstances seemed different, as the world around us seems to just be collapsing, that I

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thought it would be wonderful to hear him when he talks about the women and he talks about the lover, he is not just talking about the ego-driven love we have for one person, but a love that is expanding outward. And what he finally finds and this

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is what I think this poem is about, that there is the limitation of the body and that the angels he had called to come down to him cannot come down to him because they live in a perfect sphere. And therefore, he rejects the angelic call that

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he made in ‘’The First Elegy” and what he wants to do now is keep the angels in their place in that permanent world of stars beyond the physical, and he wants to find in this physical world meaning, and he does in the way that we face our lives.

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And we face our lives by really realizing our limitations, but that we can live whether we are rich or poor, whether we are miserable or not, we can live with a sense of those intense moments of life, which give us a sense of the permanent order of

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the universe. And this is a very rhapsodic elegy and it is not nearly as concrete as the others. But when he talks about the lover, notice who he summons- he summons the dead people who have died, mostly the dead women, the maidens who have

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died early, and they- and they will come back. So it is a love that is from- for more than one person but it is for the multitudes. And what he is against in our limitations, which is really interesting, is the materialism that totally

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conflicts us, that totally absorbs us, and takes us away. So that if we're workers, for example, we work only to earn a living and have no sense of the importance of what we do, because it has no importance, because it has been relegated

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only to profit. But he sees that there is work and there is creation, even for the worker, if the worker can see a greater meaning that anything we build, builds towards those intense moments even in work, or especially in work, where we can

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reach with an intense sense of things. The sense of the sublimity of the pattern, and organization, and unity of the universe. So here is: THE SEVENTH ELEGY from the ‘’Duino Elegies‘’ as translated

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by Stephen Mitchell. Not wooing- now the person who is not wooing is he's not wooing the angels. He's not asking them to come down anymore. Even though this is in the form of a love poem. Not wooing, no longer shall wooing voice that has outgrown

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it be the the- the nature of your cry, but instead voice you would cry out as purely as a bird, when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting that he is a suffering creature, and not just a single heart being flung into

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brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him, you would be wooing, not any less purely, so that still unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply slowly awakens and as she hears you grows warm, the ardent companion to your own

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most daring emotion. Oh, and springtime would hold it, everywhere it would echo the song of annunciation. First, the small questioning notes intensified all around by the sheltering silence of a pure affirmative day. Then up the

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stairs, up the stairway of calls to the dream of the temple of the future, and then the trill like a fountain, which in its rising jet already anticipates its fall in a game of promises. And still ahead, summer not only all the dawns of summer, not

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only how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning, not only the days so tender and flowers and above, around the pattern tree-tops, so strong, so intense. I don't need a reverence of all these unfolded powers, not only the

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pathways, not only the metals at sunset, not only after a late storm, the deep breathing freshness, not only approaching sleep and a premonition, but also the nights, but also the lofty summer nights, and the stars as well, the stars of the

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earth. Oh to be dead at last, and know them endlessly, all the stars, for how, how could we ever forget them? Look, I was calling for my lover, but not just she would come, out of their fragile graves, girls would arise and gather, for how

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could I limit the call? Once I called it, these unripe spirits keep seeking the earth, children. One earthly thing truly experienced even once is enough for a lifetime. Don't think that fate is more than the destiny of childhood. How often

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you outdistance the man who loved breathing, breathing after the bristful- blissful chase, and passed on into freedom. Truly, being here is glorious. Even you knew it, you girls who seem to be lost, to go under, in the filthiest streets of the

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city, festering there a wide open for garbage. For each have you had an hour or perhaps not even an hour, a barely measurable time between two moments when you are granted a sense of being. Everything, your veins flowed with being, but we

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can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness can't reveal itself to us until we can transform it within. Nowhere beloved will

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world be but within us, our life passes in transformation, and the external shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was, now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely belonging to the realm of concepts as though it's

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still stood in the brain. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power, formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth. Temples are no longer known, it is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart,

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where one of them still survives, a thing that was formally prayed to worship knelt before, just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it. It missed the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars,

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and statues, greater. Each top and turn of the world has such disinherited ones, to whom neither the past belongs, nor yet was what was nearly arrived. For even the nearest moment is far for mankind. Though we should not be confused by this

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but strengthened in our task of preserving the still recognizable form. This once stood among mankind in the midst of faith the annihilator, in the midst of not knowing whether it stood as if enduring, and bent stars down to it from there

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safeguarded heavens. Angel, to you, I will show it, there in your endless vision it shall stand now finally upright rescued at last, pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, the striving thrust of the cathedral gray from a fading or alien city.

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Wasn't all this a miracle? Be astonished Angel, for we are this, O great one proclaim that we could achieve this: my breath is too short for such praise. So after all, we have not failed to make use of these generous spaces, these spaces of ours.

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(How frighteningly great they must be since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.) But a tower was great, wasn't it? Oh, Angel, it was even when placed beside you. Chartres was great – and music reaches still higher and passed

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far beyond us. But even a woman in love all alone at night by her window, didn't she reach your knee? Don't think that I'm wooing, Angel, and even if I were, you would not come! But my call is always filled with departure: against such a

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powerful current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm is my call. And it's hand held open and reaching up to seize remains, in front of you, open, as if in defense and warning, ungraspable one, far above.

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And again, using this idea of a building what Rilke says is, we have made these buildings but we have forgotten the inner essence. The inner essence of let's say, going back to the earlier poem where I read ‘’The Archaic Torso of Apollo‘’, it's

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once we get that inner essence, we can then see, and work from that inner essence with a new sense of what have I called it in a lot of my classes, that quickened sense of life, which is that sense of the- the inner world inside us, and therefore

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we can build these buildings inside us which are reflected outside through what? Art, through Chartres Cathedral, through music, through poetry, through dance. And so in the end of this poem, he rejects the eternal world for this world

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because this world is the miracle in which we reflect that world. And I thought this was the appropriate season, moving towards the Christmas season, that we think about that inner world, and the power that we do have, and how we as individuals

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can see the wonder of our life. And also the limitations of just pure materialism, grasping for things as we go out and try to improve the shopkeeper's line of profit. Now I'm going to read one of the most influential works that

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Rilke ever did. I certainly suggest you go down and get Edward- Edgar Snows, I want to call them in, but it isn't. It's Edward Snow's translations or get Stephen Mitchell's "The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke," which has the complete

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Gino- ‘’Duino Elegies‘’ and other poems by from Rilke, but also, the- around three or four different very complete books by Edward Snow of the elegies, ‘’The New Poems‘’, the uncollected poems, which are rather amazing and just sort of

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really submerge yourself in Rilke itself. Well, one of the things that Rilke wrote, where a series of 10 letters to a young poet by the name of , and they are all collected, they've been newly translated in

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there in several translations, and they're called ‘’Letters to a Young Poet‘’, and in 1902, late 1902 Kappus who had been in the military school that Rilke had been in as a boy, wrote to Rilke, who is now 27 years old, because the chaplain of the

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school had seen young Kappus with a book of poems and said, ‘’Oh, and it's to Rilke, well, you know, he used to go to school here.‘’ And Kappus then sent a series of letters to Rilke and from 1903 to 1908 they corresponded with each other and

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the the the- this short volume ‘’Letters to a Young Poet‘’ is really Rilke talking as he would never talk before intimately about poetry to a young man who he's warning about the very things I've just been talking about. And as Kappus says when

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he published this in 1929, Rilke had died three years before, he did not take Rilke's his advice and in fact, went the exact opposite way that Rilke advises him to. So I'm going to read these letters and hopefully, you will go down, and maybe get them

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as a Christmas present for yourself or for a loved one. And here's the story of this. These are only Rilke‘s replies, and they're LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET.

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A first letter, Paris, February 17, 1903. My Dear Sir, Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for its great and kind confidence, I can hardly do more. I cannot go into the nature of your verses which you

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sent; for all critical intention is too far from me. With nothing, can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and

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expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes

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away, endures. After these preparatory remarks, let me only tell you further, that your verses have no individual style, although they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal. I feel this most clearly in the last poem, "My

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Soul." There's something of your own wants to come through to word and melody. And in the lovely poem "To Leopardi" there does perhaps grow up sort of kinship with that great solitary man. Nevertheless, the poems are not yet anything on their own

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account, nothing independent, even the last and the one to Leopardi. Your kind letter, which accompany them, does not fail to make clear to me various shortcomings which I felt in reading your verses, without, however, being able specifically

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to name them. You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You sent them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now, since

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you have allowed me to advise you, I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you - nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason

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that bids you to write. Find out whether it is spreading out its roots and the deepest places of your heart. Acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This, above all: ask yourself in the stillest hours

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of your night, must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer, and if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even

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into its most indifferent than slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to nature. Then, try like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love poems; avoid at

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first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own were good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore, save

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yourself from these general themes and seek those with your own everyday life offers as you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts, and the belief in some sort of beauty, describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity,

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and use to express yourself the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches;

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for to the creator, there is no poverty and no indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious

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kingly possession, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen, and will become a dusky dwelling past

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which the noise of others goes by, far away. And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption in your own world verses come and it will not occur to you to ask anyone, whether they are good versus. Nor you will try to interest

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magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment, and a voice of your life. All work od art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it, there is no

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other. Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice, for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source, you will find the answer to the question whether you must create, accept it, just as it

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sounds without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the

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creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in nature, to whom he has attached himself. But perhaps after this descent into yourself and into your inner solitude, you will have to give up becoming a poet (it is

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enough, as I have said, to feel that one could live without writing, then one was not attempted at all). But even then, this inward searching, which I ask of you will not have been in vain. Your life will in any case find its own ways

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since, and that they may be good, rich, and wide I wish you more than I can say. What more should I say to you? Everything seems to me to have it's just emphasis; and after all, I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously

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throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your most hushed hour, can perhaps, answer. It

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was a pleasure to me to find in your letter the name of Professor Horacek, the chaplain; I keep for that lovable and learning man a great veneration, and a gratitude that endures through the years. Will you please tell him how I feel? It

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is very good of him still to think of me, and I know how to appreciate it. The verses which you currently entrusted to me, I am returning at the same time. And I thank you once more for your great and sincere confidence, of which, I have

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tried through this honest answer given to the best of my knowledge, to make myself a little worthier, than as a stranger. I really am yours faithfully and with all sympathy, Rainer Maria Rilke.

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And we are celebrating the hundred and 30th anniversary today, December 4, 2005. The birth of Rainer Maria Rilke on this day in 1875. And we will go to a short musical break now and come back and read more of these extraordinary letters.

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So it is that time in the Poetry Show when we give you some public announcements and I would like to let you know that from The Bookshelf at nine o'clock tonight, we are going to do the first of two programs devoted to the life and legacy of John

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Lennon. Gary will be talking with Bob Spitz, author of an acclaimed new biography, ‘’The Beatles‘’ on Sunday following The Poetry Show, right here on KUSP at nine o'clock. I'd also like to alert you to a reading by Robert Nielsen and Patti

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Sirens, this Friday, December 9, at the Bingham Room in Sunset Center Carmel. Robert Nielsen is a published writer and photographer whose home is in Carmel Valley, California. Patti Sirens was kidnapped by gypsies and raised by wolves on the

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outskirts of New York City, oh, I remember her well. She followed the North Star to Santa Cruz where she surfs, writes, and performs poetry, and teaches writing workshops. Some poetry has won prizes and the Artist Embassy International Dancing

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Poetry Contest, National Writer‘s Union Poetry Contest, should be a very interesting reading. That is Friday, the Bingham Room, Sunset Center in Carmel, Robert Nielsen and Patti Sirens and the Poetry Santa Cruz reading, which will feature Gary

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[unidentified], is this Tuesday at 7:30 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and it will be a translation that [unidentified] has done of this extraordinary Belgian poet who is writing a poem about every single person he has ever met in his life. Sort of the

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Proust of poetry. So now, we get back to Rainer Maria Rilke. This is the hundred and 30th birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke of the great German poet and that is he wrote in German, he really is from Prague, Czechoslovakia or as it was then the Austro-Hu

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garian Empire. And we are re ding the letters he wrote to a oung man by the name of Franz Xa er Kappus who had sent him hi poems, and we just read the f rst letter. We now go through everal months later and Rilke s writing not from Paris but

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iareggio near Pisa in Italy, pril 5, 1903. The first letter as in February 1903 and just o throw this in, Viareggio is wh re Shelley took his boat out o to the sea and was drowned. So it's- it's got that resonance of the Romantic poets in it. H

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re is the great Rainer Maria Ri ke and these letters to a yo You must forgive me, my dear Sir for only today gratefully r ng po TWO, THE SECOND LETTE

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membering your letter of Februar 24. I have been unwell all this time, not exactly ill, bu oppressed by an influenza-like assitude that has made me incap ble of anything. And final y, as I simply did not get bet er, I came to this souther

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y sea, the beneficence of hich has helped me once before. ut I am not yet well, writing c mes hard to me, and so you mu t take these few lines for more. Of course, you must know that very letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and only b

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ar with the answer, which will p rhaps often leave you empty-hand d; for at bottom, and just in t e deepest and most important t ings, we are unalterably alon , for one person to be able to advise or even help anothe , a lot must happen; a lot

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must go well, a whole constellat on of things, which come- must ome right in order once to succe d. Today, I wanted to tell you just two things more. Irony: o not let yourself be governed y it, especially not in uncurl- reative moments. In creative m

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ments, try to make sure of it a one more means of graspi g life. Cleanly used, it too s clean, and one need not be as amed of it; and if you feel y u are getting too familiar wi h it, if you fear this gro ing intimacy with it, then tur

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to great and serious object , before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek a dep h of things. [unidentifie ] irony never descends and when ou come thus close to the edge o greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitud

00:36:36.270 - 00:36:51.870

springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the i fluence of serious thing , either it will fall f om you (If it is something fo tuitous), or else it will (if t really innately belongs to you strengthen into a stern instru

00:36:51.870 - 00:37:08.910

ent, and take its place in the series of tools with which you ill have to shape your rt. And the second point about which I wanted to tell you oday is this: Of all my book , just a few are indispensable to me and two even are always am

00:37:08.940 - 00:37:31.590

ng my things wherever I am. The are about me here too, the Bib e, and the books of the great D nish writer, Jens Peter Jacob en. I wonder whether you k ow his works? You can easil get them, for some of them hav come out in very good transla

00:37:31.590 - 00:37:48.660

ion and Reclam’s Universal Lib ary. Get the little volume of ‘ Six Stories‘’ in J. P Jacobsen and his novel ’Neil's Lyhne‘’, and start on the first story in the former called “Mogens.” A world will c me over you, the happiness, th

00:37:48.660 - 00:38:03.660

abundance, the incomprehensibl immensity of the world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what see s to you worth learning, but bove all, love them. This love w ll be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and howeve

00:38:03.660 - 00:38:20.070

your life may turn, it will I m certain of it, run through t e fabric of your growth as one of the most important threa s among all the threads of y ur experiences, disappoint ents, and joys. If I have to say from whom I have learned

00:38:20.070 - 00:38:37.740

something about the nature o creative work, about its depth and everlastingness, there ar the two names I can mentio : Jacobsen, that great, great writer, and that of Auguste Ro in, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all artists li

00:38:37.860 - 00:38:59.970

ing today. And all succes upon your ways! Yours, Rainer M ria Roca. Well, no one has heard of Jacobsen, of course, and it just shows that for some writers, a minor writer may hold a key or

00:39:00.040 - 00:39:17.360

an importance that a great mighty- writer might not. So what is Morton Marcus's advice to go along with Rilke's just to read whatever you want whatever takes your interest, and you may find goldmines within it. Also the mention here of Auguste

00:39:17.430 - 00:39:35.250

Rodin, when Kappus had first written several months before to Rilke, he was finishing up his- his time with Rodin, he had been there with his wife, Clara. Clara was sort of a secretary for Rodin for a while, and Rodin and Rilke got to know each other

00:39:35.320 - 00:39:51.790

very well. They were very different people. And Rilke really admired Rodin's inner energy in his sculptures, but Rodin was a very robust, earthy man, and Rilke of course, was talking about permanence and a life beyond this one. And

00:39:51.860 - 00:40:09.390

inevitably, these two very different personalities, really, really clashed. And if you want to see the difference in them, go to The Bookshop, Santa Cruz and look at my latest book, which is called ‘’Shouting Down the Silence‘’, in which I have a

00:40:09.460 - 00:40:25.140

short poem called ‘’Rilke and Rodin‘’ and it tries to define that relationship. Okay, well now another letter, the third letter from Rilke in "Letters to a Young Poet" from Viareggio again, it's just around a week later:

00:40:25.030 - 00:40:42.070

April 23, 1903. You gave me much joy, my dear Sir, with your Easter letter for it said many good things about yourself and the way you spoke of Jacobsen’s great and beloved art showed me that I had not erred in guiding your life and it's many

00:40:42.070 - 00:40:58.600

questions to the source of plenty. Now his novel "Niel Lyhne" will open up before you a book of glories and of t e deeps; the more often one rea s it, there seems to be everythi g in it, from life's very fainte t fragrance to the full big tas

00:40:58.600 - 00:41:12.910

e of its heaviest fruits. There s nothing that does not seem o have understood- be n understood, graspe , experienced, and recognized a d the tremulous afterring of memory; no experience has b en too slight, and the le

00:41:12.910 - 00:41:30.580

st incident unfolds like a desti y, and fate itself is lik a wonderful, wide web in wh ch each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and l id alongside another and held nd borne up by a hundred othe s. You will experience the gr

00:41:30.580 - 00:41:44.530

at happiness of reading this b ok for the first time and will o through its countless surpris s as in a new dream. But I c n tell you that later, too one oes through these books again nd again with the sa e astonishment that they lose no

00:41:44.530 - 00:41:59.440

e of the wonderful power a d surrender none of t e fabulousness with which th y overwhelm one at the fir t reading. One just comes o relish this novel, increasingl , to be always more grateful, a d somehow better and simpler

00:41:59.440 - 00:42:14.860

n one's contemplating, deeper n one's belief in life, and n living happier and bigger. A d later, you must read t e wonderful book of the desti y and desire of Marie Grubbe a d Jacobsen’s letters, and pag s from his diary and fragment

00:42:15.010 - 00:42:31.300

, and finally his poems, whi h (even if they're only fair y well translated) live n everlasting sound. (For th s purpose, I would advise you o buy when you have a chance, t e beautiful Complete Edition f Jacobsen’s works, which contai

00:42:31.300 - 00:42:48.160

s all these. It appears in thr e volumes, well translated, brou ht out by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig, and costs, I belie e, only five or six marks of volume.) In your opinion of “There should have been rose . . .” (that work of such

00:42:48.160 - 00:45:47.930

in comparable delicacy and fo m) you are of course quite, qu te unassailably right, as agai st the writer of the introducti n. close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the

00:45:47.930 - 00:46:06.170

two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning of the light. And if instead of “heat”, one might say, “sex”; sex in the great, broad clean sense free of any insinuation of ecclesiastical era. Then his art

00:46:06.170 - 00:46:22.310

would be very grand and infinitely important. His poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out of him as out of mountains. But it seems that this power is not always honest

00:46:22.310 - 00:46:35.330

and without pose. (But this again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues. If he would not rob them over they are ingenuousness and

00:46:35.360 - 00:46:56.390

untouchedness!) And then, where, as it rushes through his being, it comes to the sexual it finds not quite so pure a man as it might require. Here is no thoroughly mature and clean sex world, but one that is not sufficiently human. That is only

00:46:56.540 - 00:47:16.370

male, is heat, intoxication, and restlessness and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as a human being. For this reason there is in his sexual feeling,

00:47:16.460 - 00:47:35.240

something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time bound, uneternal that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate, it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will survive and endure. (But most art is

00:47:35.240 - 00:47:54.470

like that!) Nevertheless, one may deeply rejoice in what there is of greatness in it, only one must not lose oneself in it and become an adherent of the Dehmelian world which is so unspeakably apprehensive, full of adultery and confusion, and

00:47:54.470 - 00:48:10.610

so far from the real destinies that cause more suffering than these temporal afflictions, but also give more opportunity for greatness and more courage for eternity. Finally, as to my books, I would like best to send you all that might give you

00:48:10.610 - 00:48:26.660

pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, when once they have appeared no longer belong to me. I cannot buy them myself, and as I would so often like give them to those who would be kind to them. So I'm writing you, a slip of the titles (and

00:48:26.660 - 00:48:41.690

publishers) of my most recent books (the latest in all I believe I have published some 12 or 13), and must leave it to you, dear Sir, to order some of them when occasion offers. I'd like to think of my books is in your possession. Farewell, Yours

00:48:41.720 - 00:48:58.630

Rainer Maria Rilke. Well as he gets off on, again, a writer who has been lost to time, Richard or Richard Dehmel and talks about sex. One of the things that Rilke is talking about, this great passionate

00:48:58.630 - 00:49:13.810

inner feeling, which can be a pure male thing. There is definitely in Rilke, in the turn of the century, this sense of the difference between the male and the female, and he senses in the female a much stronger, purer being. Now, of course,

00:49:13.990 - 00:49:34.840

this again, in many ways puts women on a pedestal. So it's not so much a release of women into themselves, but it is again placing them, as they have been placed since medieval times and in before, as these virgin-like Madonna's on a pedestal. But he

00:49:34.840 - 00:49:49.330

does feel that way and he does feel the raw male energy, which is not, if we can put it this way, it's only one part of the circle the yang and not the yin and yang together. Oh, that's very good Mort, we‘ll leave it at that. Here we go to ‘’The

00:49:49.330 - 00:50:10.440

Fourth Letter‘’ from Worpswede, near Bremen, Germany, July 16, 1903. It is now three months later and he is answering Kappus Some 10 days ago I left Paris quite ill and tired and ourneyed into a great northerly plain, whose breath and

00:50:10.440 - 00:50:25.680

stillness and sky are to make me well again. But I came into a long spell of rain that today for the first time show sign of clearing a little over the restlessly, windblown land, and I am using this first momen of brightness to greet you,

00:50:25.680 - 00:50:54.510

ear Sir. again. May second, and you certainly remember it. When I read it, as now in the great quiet of these distances, I am touched by your

00:50:54.510 - 00:51:11.190

beautiful concern about life, more even than I had felt it in Paris, where everything resounds and dies away differently because of the too great noise that makes things vibrate. Here, where an immense country lies about me, over which the winds

00:51:11.190 - 00:51:26.730

pass coming from the seas, here I feel that no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings, that deep within them, have a life of their own; for even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and

00:51:26.730 - 00:51:45.690

almost inexpressible things. But I believe nevertheless, that you will not have to remain without a solution if you will hold two objects that are similar to those from which my eyes now draw refreshment; if you will cling to nature to the simple in

00:51:45.690 - 00:52:06.570

nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things, and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor:

00:52:07.260 - 00:52:23.520

then everything will become easier, more coherent, and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizant -and cognizance, you

00:52:23.520 - 00:52:40.350

are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you as much as I can, dear Sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and to try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books that are written

00:52:40.350 - 00:52:56.460

in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,

00:52:56.550 - 00:53:15.090

live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming, as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it

00:53:15.090 - 00:53:34.950

comes out of your own will out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing. Sex is difficult; yes. But there are difficult things with which we have been charged. Almost everything serious is difficult, and

00:53:34.950 - 00:53:51.600

everything is serious. If you only recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex (hold your own, not influenced by convention and

00:53:51.600 - 00:54:11.340

custom), then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession. Physical pleasure is a sensual experience, no different from pure seeing, or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it

00:54:11.340 - 00:54:28.080

is a great, unending experience which has given us a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all-knowing. And with that I will stop and urge you to go out and buy Rainer Maria's- Rainer Maria Rilke's ‘’Letters to a Young

00:54:28.110 - 00:54:42.810

Poet.‘’ I think if you are a young poet or if you are even just a human being, it is great advice, it is beautifully written. There's a new translation, not the inherited translation I have, which is much better than this one.

00:54:43.080 - 00:54:58.470

Anyway, this is Mort Marcus, I'll be with you in and around Christmas. Don't forget to stay tuned to "From The Bookshelf" and this has been the hundred and 30th birthday of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on The Poetry Show.

00:59:51.550 - 01:00:46.510

Gary Shapiro: Listening to The Poetry Show, that was Robert Sherman's Symphony Number Three. Next is "From The Bookshelf." This is Central Coast Public Radio KUSP Santa Cruz, KBDH San Ardo. We're on the web at kusp.org. Welcome once again to

01:00:46.540 - 01:01:03.100

"From The Bookshelf," I'm Gary Shapiro. My world changed on February night in 1964 when Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles to America for the first time. ‘’Now yesterday and today our theater has been jammed with news statement and hundreds of

01:01:03.130 - 01:01:13.330

[unidentified] all over the nation and these veterans agree with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool, who call themselves the Beatles. Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!

01:01:39.910 - 01:01:53.860

Bob Spitz has told the story of The Beatles in the most exhaustive biography yet written about them. And he's with us tonight to discuss his book, which has the most unusual title, "The Beatles." Bob Spitz, welcome to "From The Bookshelf."

01:01:54.070 - 01:01:59.890

Bob Spitz: Thanks very much. Gary Shapiro: How did you ever come up with that title? Bob Spitz: Fought it all the way to tell you the truth. Gary Shapiro: Did you What did you-