Rilke, W.H. Auden, and Pynchon

I've loved the three aforementioned writers for all of my adult life.

• Pynchon wrote V., which I think is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, and it was his FIRST!
• W.H. Auden and his wrecked face is the poster boy for poetry and poets. . . maybe he shares the poster with Jack Spicer?
• Rilke, who doesn't love Rilke? The angels and all of that in the Duino Elegies? C'mon. I read a good bit of it all in German years ago, and I just love Rilke.

But I never made the connection between them. I didn't know Auden and Pynchon were both totally into Rilke.

Today I was writing, working on my next book of poems, The Chris Hemsworth Sonnets, which I hope to have finished before they kill off Thor in the movies. And I was stuck on Rilke. I had Rilke on the brain. Jeder Engel ist Schrecklich! Was the newest poetical Ohrwurm. I decided to Google around and ended up at the bottom of a Wikipedia page and boom.

And things, loose strands of wire, broken synapses, copper sparking in the ether, all sprang to life in my tiny little head.

Also today, I was watching the latest episode of Dr. Who and an ad came on about a movie the BBC has done about Dylan Thomas. I'll be watching that. 

Rilke, Thomas, Roethke? Yeah, for some reason, this all reminded me of this short poem »