Brown smudge on the
Pale cerulean dissipates.
   The militainment
Winds down. Our little Caesar
Frowns over a tattered map.

I'd seen Sylvia Plath's drawings of course, but until now i wasn't aware that she was also a Cubist painter.

It's not easy to find stuff in English on Heribert Illig, but this seems truly "phildickian" (of or relating to the works of Philip K Dick): he apparently believes that the years between 700 & 900 AD do not exist, or...er, they lost track of the real year for awhile, & when they resumed, miscounted.

sharawadgi - beautifully asymmetrical (--Sir William Temple 1683 & 1685; used by Pope & Horace Walpole. A corruption from the Chinese. Discussed by Lovejoy in Essays in the History of Ideas; he says it expresses "an aesthetic category distinct from both the sublime and the beautiful" & equates it with another term of the same period, "picturesque". I want to resurrect this term to suggest the positive quality of a new aesthetic which i am beginning to formulate, involving several dimensions: one of which is to contain as many opposites ("perfections") as possible, e.g. red & green, fast & slow, geometric & organic...; another, tiug, might be defined as nonjudgmental referentiality, that is, invoking or appropriating a pre-existent form--be it icon, symbol, artwork, or cliche'--simply as a starting point or "hermitcrab-shell container" in which to put the new creation. See also zoomars.)

(Just off the top of my head, some works with this quality: the song "Bohemian Rhapsody"; Schwerner's The Tablets. Lessing's The Golden Notebook, "Titus" (the movie); & House of Leaves (Danielewski).

It appears the key to Auden's masterpiece The Orators is a paper by John Layard in J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst. Jul/Dec 1930 on the New Hebrides Islanders. I have not read this paper, & it may be that to do so would destroy the magic which this book posseses (& most of the rest of Auden's works lack--). But if you look at it as a case of tiug, then it is not necessary to read the paper. He painted, so to speak, on another canvas, guided by his reaction to what was already there--but the viewer doesn't have to have watched him at work.

the Need of Algebra - the effort to transcend irony

One Party Rule means never having to say you're sorry. --sayings of Asmodeus

The first rap song: "Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention (Freak Out, 1965). Not coincidentally, this is about the Watts Riots:

"You know that five in every four
Won't amount to nothing more
Than watch the rats roll 'cross the floor
And make up songs 'bout being poor..."

Wittgenstein's brother Paul, a talented pianist, lost an arm in the war; composers such as Prokofiev wrote special one-armed piano pieces for him. I think of lipograms this way...

While i'm mentioning Auden, i mustn't forget the truly extraordinary site Forgotten Ground Regained.
Paul Deane wants to revive the Old English accentual-alliterative meter, a project not quite as quixotic as it sounds. Though C.S. Lewis in an important essay explains it enough for a modern poet to try to follow the rules, i think there are some fundamental difficulties that have still to be overcome, notably the historically-lessening prominence of stress in spoken English. But it is an experiment well worth trying, if only that it makes writing so much harder.

(The essay i mentioned is: Lewis, C.S. "The Alliterative Meter." Jess B. Bessinger,
ed. Essential Articles for the study of Old English poetry. Hamden: Archon, 1968. 305-18. (Also in one of
his collections, i forget which one.))

A couple of things i liked in the current movie "Bringing Down the House": they sneak in a glimpse of the Watts Towers, & in one scene the friend of Steve Martin's character asks him to pass on a message to Queen Latifah's character: "Tell her 'The cool points are out the window. I'm all twisted up inside.'" When she hears this, she says, "That's about the nicest thing anyobne ever said to me." Later we find out this means: "I love you." And for once, a mainstream movie presents something with the essence of poetry, without grandstanding or getting it wrong.