Djuna Barnes

Born this day in 1892: Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), journalist, illustrator, and avante garde writer of drama, fiction, and poetry. Barnes was a well-respected member of the Paris literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s. She is remembered especially for her poetry collection The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings and the novel Nightwood.

A sampling:

From Fifth Avenue Up

SOMEDAY beneath some hard

Capricious star—

Spreading its light a little

Over far,

We'll know you for the woman

That you are.

For though one took you, hurled you

Out of space,

With your legs half strangled

In your lace,

You'd lip the world to madness

On your face.

We'd see your body in the grass

With cool pale eyes.

We'd strain to touch those lang'rous

Length of thighs,

And hear your short sharp modern

Babylonic cries.

It wouldn't go. We'd feel you

Coil in fear

Leaning across the fertile

Fields to leer

As you urged some bitter secret

Through the ear.

We see your arms grow humid

In the heat;

We see your damp chemise lie

Pulsing in the beat

Of the over-hearts left oozing

At your feet.

See you sagging down with bulging

Hair to sip,

The dappled damp from some vague

Under lip,

Your soft saliva, loosed

With orgy, drip.

Once we'd not have called this

Woman you—

When leaning above your mother's

Spleen you drew

Your mouth across her breast as

Trick musicians do.

Plunging grandly out to fall

Upon your face.

Naked—female—baby

In grimace,

With your belly bulging stately

Into space.

SUICIDE

Corpse A

THEY brought her in, a shattered small

Cocoon,

With a little bruised body like

A startled moon;

And all the subtle symphonies of her

A twilight rune.

Corpse B

THEY gave her hurried shoves this way

And that.

Her body shock-abbreviated

As a city cat.

She lay out listlessly like some small mug

Of beer gone flat.

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