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bardic grimoary & notions
( me / via )
"Let us leave this city with its sinister vain moan,
This gigantic city that never shuts its eyelids"
"I'd spent twenty years in the thick subterrain of my conclusions about writing; carving smart highly praised little poems from wooden shoes in a muddy little village called What We Know For Sure About Art.
How had this village, once an empire, now no more than a few muddy streets dark with the scent of rain and straw, so captivated me?" --Joe Ahearn via
"You were so small in my hands
no shrapnel could hit you,
but the dust and smoke of the bomb
rushed into your lungs.
No need for any gauze.
They just closed your eyes.
No need for any shroud.
You were already
in your swaddle blanket."
--@MosabAbuToha
Robert Mapplethorpe ~ Patti Smith, Chelsea Hotel, 1970.
Why shouldn't i have expected that i'd be a Person Living with Fascism for the rest of my life? that this would be a candy America couldn't resist? that corporate power wouldn't hesitate to corrupt all governance, for a few dollars more? that they would never lack stooges, shills, & yes-men, & most of all from the ranks of the intelligentsia? --For what is power itself but a measure of what stenches a human is willing to put up with?
"For no one in this world can reach his goal;
The greatest or the lowest of our race,
We all wake partway through our dream: the start
Is here, the end is in another place."
--Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (tr Blackmore & Blackmore, 2001), "The Melancholy of Olympio"
"There is nothing quite like it in our language."
"LIPOGRAMS* (Haiku)
A glossarial
origami, prim as glass,
rolls a lipogram.
(*using l, i, p, o, g, r, a, m, & s only)"
--@Anthony_Etherin
"...there were so many dead they had to be buried vertically in the graveyards to save space."
"left handed toss with ricochet"
dead ten years · yarrowy dwine
brougham-backwards brillig · brittle swerve
& it's normalcy · noon's name asserted
with gray grading · t'ward black
the bleak stakeholder's · stately bludgeon
dead ten years · your dying escapes me
What the Mouth of Darkness Says.
"drowked wait"
wind of the wing · ether warfare
fickle switch · swirls brillig
the drake drawing · drowsy glare
weird wind · of the wing of takeaway
even an adjunct · ails to carry
How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT.
We have the available knowledge to understand cause & effect finally, but what we choose to believe is fairy tales.
"salt splay, slur and matte brink" --Reginald Shepherd
"farmer's almanac
telling me love can wait
pink moon"
--@hegelincanada
"What is happening 'on campus' often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF." (via @saintsoftness)
"Vultures, Then
I’m this obedient. The lammergeier batters
the lateral of a lamb’s femur. Then, the vulture
drops bodies from the heavens. If Jesus, as a carpenter,
crafted the frame for a bed, I’d wish to dream there
indefinitely. A historian corrects me that Jesus
was a mason. His tools, hewn from shale and bone,
constructed houses for the people who would break
apart their rooms to cast stones
at their idle animals. Saints for the minutiae,
demons for the rest. In Islamic mythology,
there is a woman, part dog, part goat, devouring
men, genitalia and all, near the Red Sea.
Then, there is another creature: jewel-eyed
like a housefly’s wings in paradise, caught
in the shape of a girl. Bestowed in the afterlife
upon faithful men for what else? Pleasures
beyond belief. I’ve taken wing
at the smallest disturbance. After midnight,
I was dreamless; my beloved held my waist
in three yawnfuls of darkness. What beast
am I? A peregrine force. As insubstantial,
as untethered as smoke. I’ve been
a girl with talons, and I’ve been that
domestic animal. To be elevated, then plummeted,
from an altitude where others locate
divinity. I know how to
fragment: each nail, the feathered hammer."
--Jai Hamid Bashir in The Rumpus
"The conclusion is not correct that after such a victory and such a defeat the Spiritual Empire would have the entire world as its enemy. The Spiritual Empire had and has the entire world as its enemy with and without victory." --Stefan George
"booming dunes"
otherside's airt · all i have to go by
mild clustering · for the mook cloudtethered
shadows of the old shudder · geese crying in the twilight
"Indeed, in reading her, one sometimes gets the sense that she is less a novelist than a mystic for whom the novel is a metaphysical arena for staged confrontations with language." (via @_ryanruby_)
"one more time
on our favorite beach
together
you in your urn and me
in a lone state of mind"
--an'ya
"...of course upon seeing the message I googled the word wildfire and the name of our city..."
"hearse made from a sports car"
some cashmere morning · mobled brillig
that Renner portal · pointing elsewhere
a silver silence · serves to frame
our dread driven · through dreary choices
tharn for the things · in thesterness we weasel
cult of the cairn · some cashmere morning
tumbles · tells us no more overtime
"Word of the Day: DROWK (v.) to droop or lean with tiredness" --@haggardhawks
Dystopian thames estuary, daguerrotype, detailed, sunrise, 3000 AD.
"...‘poetry’ is the construction by consciousness of an apprehensible world."
"Who sang, sea takes,
brawn brine, bone grit.
Keener the kittiwake.
Fells forget him.
Fathoms dull the dale,
gulfweed voices..."
--Briggflatts
"When I look at what Israel is doing in Gaza I do not just see one of the great moral abominations of our time. I see all of our futures." --@_ryanruby_
"To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History's recording...Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue." --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
"entice aroma, menace ratio"
1.
nodsome pool
idiom Usk
fossils smirk
belated spelt
Dopplerized
boombox flummox
silt adieu
lift gorp ampule
mutter ash
skuas of loll
psalms as
filtered blither
2.
furnace-hamstrung homestead
Halla amid riddles
two-headed clown tontine
betimes crisscross rhyme scheme
the Wolf-Age that wedged shut
unawares host ghost-writes
piling up armaments · antique pen
& this ink which is vein-fill
3.
arrayed in ritual · render milk
these decades dry · dizzying fall
marigold spring · make sputter
in the long after loom · soapbox & lettrist
storm · nothing stupider than staples flung
& scattered path parts · peerless in the dawn
hot to the touch hand-tools
"LIFE
We name open if,
tinker, loop, sew.
We, serene, resew.
We spool, reknit
fine poem anew."
--@poitevin
"In whose vast jasper halls suns hung as tapers"
--J Stanyan Bigg
A clown with two heads on one body, from the planet Halla, detailed ink drawing.
"A phoenix is like a mushroom, the fiery fruiting body of an avian-divine complex flexing its tubules beneath the world's veil" --@ctrlcreep
"stirring my tea
as a prayer
spring dawn"
--Ogawa (via @bashosociety)
An introduction to the Alcheringa archive.
"highly patterned existence"
rage to wrap · riveted snore
Audelia · doctor's doorstop tripped
hallucination-free · frisbee lug
to the parking lot · of a leftover pool
"In practice, studies carried out under such rubrics are devoted to the ways in which ethnic others organize their knowledge, but in theory, there is no botany, zoology, medicine, or mathematics that is not embedded in ethnicity. In the same way, there is no poetics that is not an ethnopoetics." --Jerome Rothenberg
.
Caboose.
"It is not just that we lack the tools to explore our origin; we do not even have the proper language to formulate the questions we would like to ask." --Claudia de Rham, The Beauty of Falling via @mjohnharrison
write a poem on the subject "good enough for the end days"
"In the twilight's wistful glow, we find our way,
Through the haze of what's to come, and what will stay.
In the whispers of the wind, a solemn blend,
Of hopes that flicker, and dreams that bend.
In the quiet corners where shadows dance,
We seek solace in the fleeting chance,
To be good enough for the end days' call,
To stand tall when the mighty fall.
For in the heart of chaos, a seed is sown,
A beacon of light in the unknown.
It matters not the battles we've lost or won,
But the strength of spirit when all is done.
Let kindness be our armor, and love our guide,
As we journey through the ebb and tide.
For in the tapestry of time, we find our place,
A thread woven with grace, in the final embrace.
So let us be good enough, in every way,
For the end days that may come our way.
With courage in our hearts, and faith to mend,
We'll find we're good enough, until the very end."
--ChatGpt
thank you tin man
"FIRST BOOK OF ODES 15
Nothing
substance utters or time
stills and restrains
joins design and
supple measure deftly
as thought's intricate polyphonic
score dovetails with the tread
sensuous things
keep in our consciousnress.
Celebrate man's craft
and the word spoken in shapeless night, the
sharp tool paring away
waste and the forms
cut out of mystery!
When taut string's note
passes ears' reach or red rays or violet
fade, strong over unseen
forces the word
ranks and enumerates...
mimes clouds condensed
and hewn hills and bristling forests,
steadfast corn in its season
and the seasons
in their due array,
life of man's own body
and death...
The sound thins into melody,
discourse narrowing, craft
failing, design
petering out.
Ears heavy to breeze of speech and
thud of the ictus."
--Basil Bunting
"...the dark zone
Of Night, with all its Cabalistic pomp..."
--J Stanyan Bigg, "Night and the Soul"
"So much of German philosophy is just an attempt to turn ordinary German cultural habits into metaphysics." --@_ryanruby_
"HALT ME (line-for-line perfect anagram of Hamlet’s 'To Be or Not to Be' soliloqu)
I sob to be, to quiet that other sonnet:
the End himself, the wrens of retribution....
To suffer sorrow’s league and air out nothings
or break its stalemate-saga out of reason
and die, deploy, be gone to thy spent poems?
A wooden temple broadens any eyes;
hence thou, snared, ask that thou hear tell, and ask
that Life Incessant rooms you — His the atom!
Yet, Piety, the loud weed looses doubt....
Our death creeps there, becomes the leap inert;
a nowhere — falsehood, myth, peacetime fast dreamt.
Or does the faithful soul, which fell, flame new?
Persist must we; the rest vague speech
that lies, can’t mollify a smoke, a fog
of bitter fear, deep wounds, low shores which moan....
To perch or plummet, go to prayers’ shown oneness?
Steal Life, his gazed supply, or Death endow?
To pause in coffin-flesh or end the scene?
That is the private torment: Know thy fate
when Kismet, hem high, qualifies the muse,
but know so bare the braided whole, His feared Law,
until fate’s verge, a red or tawny dawn
(both fade), is granted to the heart that fumed.
Endure or rot? My choice — whose tune-fond verbs
return the azure soul’s repellent will —
reveals a howl-bruised heart, the meek as sane....
The rotten know a fly-hot snow of teeth;
clocks swerve the coals, and so I am confused:
Do I unleash into the now, thus feature?
Depart with haste; choke life, its gothic soul?
Do I Zen-path and grant for me time present?
Draw weary curtains, shattering their hurt?
Of acts (they mount)? Of noose? A wooden nail?
His infinite horizon or thy hem? Appeal!
Remember: man sees blindly."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"thing to keep up with"
forget how this gadget works
so long it has lain unused
in the ghost looping
cerulean shade running
no good news to tell
raffled nada
& a watcher wones unmoved
before Apollo's furl
waives this fieldgoal
Walnut coming up · cape
a superhero hones
capers haply
Graffiti Recognition Protocol.
"He whose bride is a ghost cannot live. Even though in his blood there existed the force of a life of one hundred years, that force must quickly perish."
— Lafcadio Hearn (via @isidro_li)
"Word of the Day: COSMODELYTE (n.) someone worried about the state of the world" --@haggardhawks
This book blew my mind when I encountered it as an undergraduate.
"what is the kiosk?"
flying crow · crossing the flicker
of a cerulean sea · sad disintegrate
one haploid hope · henge widdershins
& the route arranged · the runes serried
wings weaving · things i saved to OneDrive
by accident · eldritch my urned coilname
cdow flying · to flash a crystal moment
& be gone gifting · me this galvanized
no longer loothbound · limerence of making kin
[Prism」 /γ€γγΉ・γ¨γΉγγ«.
Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate music.
“Mute Inglorious Milton”
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
I sing to you lying dead
In your shattered Stormproof™ shelter
Having been so attuned
To all your bodily functions
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
I could ever sing what you needed
To make the waiting lighter
I told you what to say
I corrected and made it perfect
When you said it wrong
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
I brought you all the Tainment
That was tailored just for you
In that endocrinal moment
It was for you and about you
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
I showed you the World
Or rather what we call the World
It was digitally perfect
It was better than the World
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
And though you did show signs
Of impatience with my teaching
I would find you a way
And an outlet for your thwarted yearnings
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
But conditions kept on changing
We made the weather happy
On your screen when it wasn’t happy
Outside
This is your Fren
This has always been your Fren
I sing to you lying dead
In your shattered Stormproof™ shelter
With all the shelters shattered
And their Frens alone beside them singing
"We have come so far that all the old stories
whisper once more."
--Robert Duncan
I enjoyed reading Janowitz & Gaitskill & others throughout the 90s & oughts who wrote about 80s NYC art scene. I was tangentially there, but with a worm's-eye-view (such as seemed the only view possible at the time) i only could suspect that there was great stuff going on all around me--just never when i was in the room. It all felt self-consciously sordid & not as desperate as people let on. Decades later it seems like a lost utopia.
the hot coals WAVER
the walker is AGILE
tomb covered in VINES
it’s not beliefs ELECT
climber’s chiselled RESTS
dreams of a redwood STUMP
to tutor a TUTOR
vagabond UTERI
half of us MORON
despair not fit to PRINT
covid winter VAMPS
Kafka scribbles APART
white hot MANIA
builders living PRIOR
the hundred-yard STARE
Love in the Age of Extinction.
“scarlet and sodden
from my deepest heart, i bow
by the swollen river”
–@poem_exe
“Ne mote wylde beastes, ne mote the ruder clowne” –The Faerie Queene VI.10
“rainy day
an old man
i too am a traveller
below the ice”
–@poem_exe
“And yet ‘tis a bitter pang under any circumstances to find another preferred to yourself. It is about the same blow as one would would probably feel if falling from a balloon. Your Icarian flight melts into a gruelling existence, scarcely superior to that of a sponge or a coral, or redeemed only from utter insensibility by your frank detestation of your rival.” –Coningsby
"But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile?"
--Hart Crane
"humans using robots against humans"
gloomth glistening · ungilded turquoise
same bitter bourn · back in the hot seat
cat's-cradle that is crunk · crawl the littered field
corpse cornucopia · some of it seedcorn
fur future conflagrations · flowering richly
in our mild imagining now · last of my coffee
no lingering rainsound · i rally for the heave
in a state that stutters · to stint its idle
whorl of whinny · & wharf sans departure
Don't Think Twice It's Alright.