Translated by Nadia Brunstein and published by Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, Bucaresti, 2023
Reviews
Itaca (Dublin, Ireland)
Romanian Diaspora Magazine
Editor/Author, Emanuel Pope (England)
Once, in the olden days, there circulated in our lands the legend of the traveling God, of a God who inspected his own good work, his creation. And I am convinced that it was not only in our mythology that such a character roamed. Just as I well know people who have sheltered him, cared for such a guest in the night, and the next day found themselves with all their own in palaces of cunning, and from the poor and poorlings they became rich with great fame and true beauties of intrusion, amazingly talented and learned. And that’s why I think reading, leafing through and reading again ” How long would you blink out of the third eye”, the volume of poems by the author Valery Oisteanu published by the Museum of Romanian Literature in 2023 that it is surely the book of a magical concept, but what do I say concept? it is the physical proof of a significant spiritual manifestation of transgression, a poetic substitution of corporeality, more precisely the substitution of the poet Valey Oisteanu with the spirit body of God himself. A God who willed and willed himself poetically and who chose as his worldly means of transportation the body and the surrealist artist’s mind of the New Yorker of Ukrainian origin but educated in Romania: Valery Oisteanu. What more beautiful gift than this to man and at the same time to the divinity within him!
But let us observe the blink of this God as he journeys through the womb of his own creation.
From the “invisible ghostly eyed donkeys” of Morocco, to the children of the Kasbah and the drumming dervishes of the Tuareg past, our ubiquitous traveler dreams himself in Riyadh under the one-eyelid moon and with “102 camels in bed”. But it was just the blink of an eye again and there he was in the Tokyo underground, lost as if in a labyrinth, and then without shoes:
“Tengu- geta the devil’s shoes,
Okobe-geta for geishas
Where are the waragies?
My enchanted slippers are gone
Morning…barefoot
Barefoot in the morning. “
But do not complain, the poet Valery Oisteanu, the newest bearer of the special Spirit, knows and makes poetry out of everything in the good order known and inherited from European surrealism. Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton are also here, as they were for the poet, and now for the God re-imagined-poet, true apostles-prophets and only in Bucharest, which has become the capital of Absurdistan, can they all breathe honestly and in the landscape of total and burnt misfortune can they improvise a truly honest and honest life:
Valery read Anarchy for a Rainy Day in Romanian at the basement at Green Hours (theater), Mircea Florian on the drâmbă (a mouth lyre), A night of talks and autographs With Doru Rocker Ionescu and Răzvan Țupa (an event to which I was invited and to which I couldn’t go, all the more because the book was translated into Romanian under my signature.)
Valery gathers everything, scatters and rearticulates the world according to his will, and also according to his will are the surreal tenets that carry him through an Italy “far from Caravaggio”, but where “the streets had been paved with books and lava stones”, “Picasso and Cocteau’s nanas were playing tambourines” and “Alberto Moravia was talking to John Steinbeck.” And so too in the Portugal of “Fado Dada”, where “The blessings of Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), the restlessness of Ricardo de Reis (Fernando Pessoa) The road to Coimbra is paved with jagged lives.”
A thoroughbred intellectual, fully cultured in the best atmosphere of the flower power, infatuated American years, not to mention that he was once even Borges’ pupil, Valery Oisteanu garnishes his pilgrimage in this book with 12 collages, superb and instigating to mystery, all made by the artist, in an analog way, so not digital, and once in London, in a pub on the banks of the Thames I could admire him in the middle of such an exercise of creation. And can anyone tell me that there is not a spirit in the body of a poet in all this accomplishment!
But let me give you some of their titles, true poetic one liners of full surrealism: “Third-Eye Geisha”
“The Dead Can Grow”
“Pin-Up Head with Hat”
“Radical Tilt”
But God also read Dante and as a result could not refrain from visiting in such an incognito way the “Purgatory of Ghosts”, as the second sub-chapter of the volume is called, where a significant amount of good names appear, from unknown to me or forgotten: Nanos Valaoritis with “pockets full of clouds”, Steve Dalachinsky gone ” like a soluble fish in the ocean”, Steve Cannon who published his book “Perks in Purgatory”. Hedda Șterne, “the silent sister of the Bucharest avant-garde”, Harold Schultz, a true forgotten hero, Dina von Zweck, “the reflection of a piano moan”
…to the unforgettable Andy Warhol, whom he knew personally: “Everyone has to have a fantasy. His was sex with a red cello,” Elie Wiesel to whom “A lonely comet illuminated A-7713 on his left arm.” The memory of Auschwitz stigmatized his skin,” Yevtushenko who “left the planet” and Andre Breton on the 50th anniversary of eternity:
“Breton’s shadow sits on the throne
Imposing an alchemical lexicon”
Arriving at subchapter III, the God willed poet and inhabiting man Valery feels the need for an indulgence and ventures into the neighborhoods of his living space in America: East Village where the poet is sometimes “invisible”, sometimes “looking for clouds”, or endangered by local fires, in the struggle with the existence of the “dumb machine where you’re shell-shocked, but not quite dead”, where “Poetry died hidden in university libraries” and “the echo of vertical ice echoes in his head.” But “Dada is not on tour” , Dada “is nada, a time traveler in the opposite direction” and poet Valery continues messianically with the spirit inhabiting him:
” A random illusionist, intentionally confused
The templar of the temple of intemperance!
Dada is not a cult,
It’s the noise of the anti-lifestyle
Bottled in people’s silence”
Absolutely superb this definition from “Sparta” of an authentically poetic and surrealist spirit to the eye’s glitter. Bravo, Valery (and tell me he wasn’t inhabited by a god when he wrote this magnificent volume!). Let’s close our eyes slowly and skip the episode of the pain of broken bones (a real episode) and let the “music of suffering” continue in “the advantage of exhaling blue helium”:
“Everything is illusory,
ill-conceived, ill-handled
Reversal of affinities
in protoplasmic anarchy”
The poet is “only one eye” and we would say “the third”, an eye with which he manages to see everything in a single blink, history, time, “a dada scout dedicated to movement” a man who manages through his artistic sense to still have humor even while poetically reliving his life: a
“continuous travelog of curiosity
Anticipating the next crossing”.
And here we come to the fourth substantial sub-chapter of Jazzoetry, a term coined by the poet as a veritable Demiurge of a world in rearrangement, a reason for celebrating the memory of the middle name: Max Roach and Cecil Taylor (if I’m not mistaken he also features it in my translated volume Anarchy for a Rainy Day. Congratulations, here, to the translator Nadia Brunstein in particular for her translation of the poem “Sanatorium of no return”.
” A legacy of dominance
The blood stench of arrogance
Eternal allusion to impotence
Preponderance of irrelevance
Mass hysteria of inconstancy
The visceral, vociferous, visceral cricket
The macabre dance of ignorance Continue”
The poet is a pendulum that in its movement achieves unimaginable performances: he whispers from behind the stones, Wednesday dreams faster, then imagines himself a Don Quixote in “Main Street” and reaches a lyrical climax in “Snow in the Clear” followed by “Atlantic Journey” inscribed in the crust of a “misty Canadian” landscape.
As the style is everywhere a real magician’s delight, it was only natural that this should be maintained in the last sub- chapter with a title as suggestive and juicy as possible for a tireless imagination such as Valery’s: “Pandemic Variations”. And I can’t help joking, in spite of the seriousness required by so much pain that we have all carried on our shoulders during the pandemic: here is where the much invoked God was during the pandemic, here he is immobilized, wrapped as if in a seraph in the robe of the poet and man Valery, who, imprisoned in his East Village apartment, opens his ultra-sensitive antennae over the horizon, and in my humble opinion’, this is the exceptional part of the present volume. I begin with what I like best, which is the very end:
” Unscrew the skull and paint the brain
A consistently inconsistent organ”.
The poet’s pandemic world is an unrecognizable world, a “sunset over a nefarious landscape of lips”, an “epitaph for the Day of Judgment”, a “poisoned New York” and a kind of “rocking with the pandemic”, a horizon without friction
“no penetration,
An overwhelming afterthought of frustration
“Lonesome, sexless, desolated marginality
Addicts isolated in an attic, cock-less
Perverts without a permit
Abandoned genitals waiting to be loved again
A dead moon hidden in the lost bowels of the sky”
But once again, the poet’s playful health cannot live in a state of restlessness and he bursts with full force in the memorable poem “International Tickle Day—February 29, 2020”
I leave here an excerpt thanking you for your inexhaustible patience and generosity. With this volume, the poet and the spirit that divinely inhabited the man Valery Oisteanu have succeeded in giving shape to a surrealist surplus of the best surrealism, a surplus and an excellent spiritual exercise that will never be equaled. We thank you, Valery Oisteanu, for this gift that will continue to cross the history of Romanian literature, as long as it exists!
“Yes, it’s International Tickle Day
But nobody knows about it
No one came to deliver a tickle
I’ll probably have to take to the streets
And I beg some passers-by, don’t get upset, tickle me!” ….
Yes, that’s right, Valery: “Long Live International Tickle Day!”