Skip to main content

Poem By Cralan Kelder

Eyewear is very pleased to feature Cralan Kelder (pictured) this Good Friday.

I met him in Berlin late last year at the Hearings 2006 festival put together by Alistair Noon. Cralan is a unique performer - erudite, erratic, engaged, empathetic, engaging, expressionist, entertaining, and ultimately, enthusiastic. He had the audience enraptured by the end. He's the Kelder Statesman of European Continental poetry.

Kelder was born in London in 1970, but spent the first fifteen years of his life in California, before moving to the Netherlands in 1985. He studied anthropology and agricultural development in St. Andrews and at UC Davis, then conducted development work and research in Lesotho and Nambia.

His beautiful poetry collections include Lemon Red (Coracle 2005) and Night Falls and Is Slow to Get Up (Longhouse 2005). French Pastry will be released as a broadside by Coracle in 2007. In Amsterdam he is a member of wordsinhere writing collective and the poetry editor of Versal http://versal.wordsinhere.com. His website is http://www.cralan.com and is recommended.


French Pastry

Driving through Wyoming,
I see my first ‘boycott france’
bumper sticker.

By some great stroke of luck
we actually have a croissant
in the truck, and I am prepared
to throw it.

Imagine their surprise,
to have a croissant hurled down at them
from a passing pickup,
leaving a light, buttery, imprint
on their windshield.

But they are too fast uphill in their sedan and
I have to hope that we will see them again,
parked somewhere down the road, maybe at a rest stop,
so that I can gently and firmly tuck
my french pastry beneath their wipers.


poem by Cralan Kelder

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".