a blind flaneur

Rainier Maria Rilke works at his writing desk in the Hôtel Biron, Paris [Source: Requiem for a Friend]
I found this photo yesterday as I jumped from Rainier Maria Rilke to Paula Modersohn-Becker and back again. It comes from a web site supporting a 2005 independent film (The Greater Circulation) about the writing of Requiem for […]

Reading Rilke’s Requiem for a Friend reminded me of a poem that was its direct descendant, Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Novogodnee” (”New Year’s Greeting”). Tsvetaeva wrote the poem in Paris in an outpouring of grief and nervous exhaustion after Rilke’s death in 1926. Tsvetaeva and Rilke had a deeply expressed poets’ friendship that paralleled the […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Selbstbildnis als Halbakt mit Bernsteinkette II. 1906. Kunstmuseum Basil.
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was a young German artist who created 600 paintings and over 1000 sketches in her brief career at the beginning of the 20th century. She lived and worked in Worpswede, an artist enclave in rural Germany that resisted artistic domination […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke was painted in Paris in 1906 [Source: Wikimedia Commons]. After her untimely death a year later, Rilke wrote the haunting masterpiece, Requiem for a Friend, in her memory.
Rainier Maria Rilke on Wikipedia
Ranier Maria Rilke: Letters To A Young Poet
This site publishes all ten of Rilke’s letters […]