Rilke Week

14-20 March 2010

RILKE WEEK CONTENTS
1. "For Here There is No Place that Does Not See You"
2. "Rilke Week" (this post)
3. "The Panther"
4. "Rilke on Facebook"
5. "Lady Gaga's Rilke Tattoo"
6. "[You Who Never Arrived]"
7. "A Boy Called Sophia"
8. "[For the sake of a single poem]"

More to come as the week progresses. Guest-blogging submissions welcomed and encouraged. Now back to the original post...

-----

Next week, for me, is Spring Break. Though I will devote time to adventures with my wife and our young daughter and son, I view the week not as a vacation but as a chance for extra reading and writing. With this in mind, I'll dedicate a week's worth of blog entries to the poems and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, drawing primarily from Stephen Mitchell's translations in The Selected Poetry and Letters to a Young Poet.

If you're at all interested, no matter who you are, please join me for discussion in the blog's "comments." In fact, if you feel so inclined, I welcome proposals for guest posts during Rilke Week. Yes! I'd love that. Email me.

-----

But why wait for next week? Let's start now. Here's Rilke on a subject near and dear to my heart--or is it my head?--these days:

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless. Search into the depths of Things: there, irony never descends - and when you arrive at the edge of greatness, find out whether this way of perceiving the world arises from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious Things it will either fall away from you (if it is something accidental), or else (if it is really innate and belongs to you) it will grow strong, and become a serious tool and take its place among the instruments which you can form your art with.

(from a letter to Franz Kappus written in Viareggio, near Pisa, Italy, collected as the second of ten in the invaluable book Letters to a Young Poet)

-----

I have lately tried and found myself guilty of Overusing Irony, often as a stimulant in particularly uncreative moments (perhaps even in this sentence). Over at Facebook, irony became my default mode. I'm trying to break the habit. Though I have no idea what Rilke means when he says one can use irony "purely," I take seriously his reminder that irony never descends "into the depths of Things."

-----

By the way, this won't be the first time a blog has declared "Rilke Week."