#549 La Voie Royale

Once more the war; though
now it seems some joy has
been permitted to infiltrate
the outlook. The Wehrmacht 
turned back at Stalingrad, 
enough of a setback to pre-
tend a beginning to an end.
Hope springs eternal wrote
the poet Pope, & the kings —
though fewer of them around
these days — string along by 
opening the kingsways up to 
celebration. No fireworks —
gunpowder is strictly mili-
tary matériel in times of war — 
but the dead are plentiful, as
are the flowers that feed on
them. Picked, & thrown in
to the air; &, from a certain 
perspective, not quite golden 
apples but, in times of scarcity,
perhaps the next best thing.

#548 La leçon d'anatomie (1943)

In Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson 
all is dark — the lecturer, the
onlookers who look too old
to be students, who are in fact
doctors who've paid to be in the 
painting, the cadaver over which
Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is carrying
out an explanation of the musc-

ulature of the human arm. One
public dissection permitted each
year, held in a theater as if it were
a play, with a paying audience, 
the body to be that of a convicted 
criminal who has been executed.

In Magritte's painting, it is the ab-
sence of dark that marks its pre-
sence. A war is being fought; but
rather than depict that, the painter 
channels Renoir to let bright light 
enter. A landscape in a vase, trees 
in flower, color. An attitudinal turn-
around, the visible made invisible.

Recently published

Mark Young
The Magritte Poems
Sandy Press
ISBN: 979-8-9898666-3-2
Amazon URL: https://a.co/d/65ZzzPr
648 pages
Paperback: $US24.99
Kindle: $US12.00

This is a book 21 years in the making. The first Series Magritte poem — three words, three lines — was composed on the front step of a motel room at Yarra Glen, about 50 kilometers from Melbourne. It appeared on the As/Is blog in — I think — November 2003, was followed by another twenty or so at the same blog, & then, in March 2024, the following post appeared at my then main blog, Pelican Dreaming:

I have decided to start a blog for my Series Magritte poems. The URL is https://seriesmagritte.blogspot.com.

As I write this, there are 547 poems up at Series Magritte. I have included all of them in this book. Interspersed among them are a number of other poems — the Florence Foucault centos, composed of extracts from Michel Foucault's book on Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe, & the 1860 The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, by Florence Hartley, some of which actually appeared under the pseudonym of Florence Foucault, & also included are other of my poems that reference Magritte, including one that dates back to 1974. My admiration for René Magritte goes back a long way!

This is a collected, not a selected, so it may be uneven in quality. I would also have liked to include some of the Magritte paintings that inspired the poems, but that would undoubtedly have raised copyright issues as well as ending up as a seriously expensive tome. I have no intention of stopping writing Magritte poems, but I've decided to bring a dotted line to the venture so that I can see what it looks & feels like in book form. For those that don’t like the heft of such things, there is also a Kindle edition which Amazon warns may take a while to download.

I want to thank Javant Biarujia for his introduction, which is up at Sandy Press, & Sheila E. Murphy for her blurb which can be found on the Amazon page. Their words are more than I deserve.

I also want to thank Bill Allegrezza & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen for publishing earlier selections of my Magritte poems. I want to thank harry k stammer for publishing this collection & for doing the covers of some of the aforementioned smaller books. Lastly, I'd like to pay tribute to René Magritte for making the invisible visible.

Three poems from Series Magritte at YouTube

via The Continental Review





Read by Miia Toivio & with graphics by Marko Niemi

#547 Among the Groves of Light

It is an analog module in the
open air, a small thing in a
large area, high in bright light, 
low in the dark. Perfectly posit-
ioned to host the most popular 
fund-raising events of the year, 
it reads data from many sources, 
harnesses the continuous vari-
ation aspect of physical pheno-
mena to provide 16 or more 

channels in the same space, uses 
cookies to ensure that it gives the
user the best experience. Unfortu-
nately, in shade, branches will 
wither & drop to the ground; & 
the right stick has an almost 35% 
deadzone, regardless of any set-
tings. Which means in this range 
the in-game camera won't react 
at all to its controller's input.

#546 [Untitled]

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

#545 Memory of a Journey (1955)

In the
dark I become
accustomed
to the work
of Le Douanier 
Rousseau.

It helps
that I have
a lion
beside me.

#544 La Pensée parfaite (1943)

The war continues in a 
linear fashion. Not so 
the seasons. Here they 
are condensed, all four
evident on the one tree. 
A thumbing of the nose 
to the man-made dam-
age that has, that will, 
be done elsewhere to 
the earth. We are out-
side it, says the tree. We 
have the freedom you 
can only dream about. 

#543 Dada Mag (1921)

ADAM DAG

DAMD AGA 

MAGA DAD

AMGD ADA

MAGD AAD

ADGA AMD

DADA MAG

#542 L'Espoir Rapide

Everything can probably 
be remembered 
but it’s the linkages 
& the lack of space to

keep them near that 
make it difficult. Memory 
is not linear. That’s for
planning the future 

where you write yourself 
preliminary notes & leave
them in strategic places.
So that whenever it is 

you arrive at wherever 
you were going you can
open them up & see what
happened along the way. 

#541 Excuseer, Juffrouw, is het een sprekende film?

Does that really matter? Even if the film
is silent, the continuity — or discontinuity —
of its contents, the things we are seeing,  
provokes an inner mono- &/or dialogue. 

Not necessarily in words. Could be images,
fragments of a past or figments of a future, 
that have nothing to do with what was en-
visaged by the auteur, but triggered by it

even so.  Could be sounds, birds on the
roof, trains passing in the night, what we
grew up listening to, what we associate
with the wider screen where they appeared.

Or maybe we approach it in the same way
we partake of a day at the races. The colors,
the numbers, known & easily discernable; 
the purpose clear, but not yet the outcome. 

As complement, a gallery full of the works of an
almost contemporary Belgian master which
presents a nominally silent narrative, but has
within it a host of interwoven speaking parts.