IPOMOEA (1990)

'...for the place beneath the Moon is circumnebulous, that is, dark on every side. But the Lunary is partly lucid and partly dark, that is, one half bright, the other half dark; but the place above the Moon is circumlucid or bright throughout.' --Psellus,
Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles

     1.

There, I am me.

The desolation (of the site of once bustling wharves) was made more striking by the utter loneliness of the shore, and the unpleasant odour from the vegetation reeking in the giant purpose federal. Many fantastic mirrors fought hard to retain their former freedom/: a lamplight across our granulated vampire desert, whose irksome forgiveness never entreats any radiant answer except solitude.

I have seen a tree that grew through a chainlink fence, where maidens above us saw where some latent visitors and I am. My velvet darknesses in my gaunt and thought sobbing deep on its stream its on; chrome remember how; nothing worthy of notice occurred in the beginning.--that which is cast ashore by the waves--A shorn horror that just wondered what and who were me. Some rare still songs across some such crests/ swift survive seawall my night to all Cassini, and I fled.

Well the or Saturn spun a structure/ hierchically of the journey; across what perilous bubbles of nothing?--Ourselves, ancient embers across the deep, many below they who rustle no fast bursts that barely open.

Caverns invisible, times by sales many, of crimson and internal. Flow cleaned waves have its one face turned, under the torrential rain you blessed./Victorian
murderesses. They clasp his purple syllables between the ominous (legs). They also fill the latent homes of the infamous.

Blackbody was this institution from all darkness. Below her radiant fact opposite the forgiveness, she just entreats its ghastly sainted forms, gently. --Our redundant visitor whose sorrow we shall for the contents of seams color dense. How does anything also filling her entrance with them? For example, its entrance opposite my placid door...

Your redundant door, where a redundant maiden behind this sorrow on their infamous ember, when this visitor with what are being doing who well/ spasmodic maiden where something always gets, wants to always give your midnight when most redundant sorrows among them are being come. That infamous visitor across stars, who must call all volumes, who shall frown me well by few doors, whose evil seraphim remembered/(they neatly are calling spasmodic sorrows. Those beings above we that are being perching, never stream stars who streamed all respites/ when it is expended against gravity.

By a kind of fatality, they obey blindly the obscure urgings of their malignant essence/ when you are stepping the late fancies above it. Our fantastic sculptured answer whose unseen dirges/ abducted by an all-girl band. By who, on who, in front of what what eagerly what, in front of his weak stars, outside lands who are feeling, inside both ungainly horrors, behind they/ who also used her shutter that stood me.

Some lost sorrows which want to always turn they/ were basically circular dances at night. Every spasmodic door and star this earth were lost. The horse beside it by kept night sculpt; I gave my word, and I kept it. The sign who reclined against a seraph, that had been also made.

I would like to announce, Samaras said loudly, that there is nothing wrong with my machine. It's your power supply. And there he died, in the year 597, early one morning as he knelt before the altar.

"It is well sometimes to half understand
a poem in the same manner that we half
understand the world." --G K Chesterton,
Browning (1903)

Just because You're Paranoid...Dept.

'Of whose gay tracery is the picture
A complainant?
Papery is the dress
Of each figure face in the painting.
Fiery-footed I am, the molten despair
Of the prison do not ask:
Each link of the chain is here
A fire-curled fire-filleted hair.
The dazzle-of-deceit is the prey of the
Peacock's despair;
In the greenness is, of the garden's
Glory of encirclement, the snare.
The joy-of-creation-of-magic-producing-
Coquetry-of-expressing-
The-intense-desire-of-being-killed!
in the furnace-of-fire is the hoof
Of the prey from the beloved's scimitar.
Ho-digging-oh torment of life, ah, do
Not of loneliness ask!
To pass until morning the eve
Is to dig a milk-canal through rocks.
The brick the prop-of-the-helpless-hand,
And the structure the arms
Of departure; when has ever
Flood filled the wine-cup of a building?
The despair-of-the-dream-of-nonexistence
Is the din-of-the-spectacle,
Asad; the eye alone
Is the brightness of interpretation's mirror.'

--the opening poem in Ghalib's collection (ibid)


'Therefore the Romans were not so great because they
were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with
impuny.' --Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, tr Bryce in The
AnteNicene Fathers v.6

'I was a string in the harp of enchantment
for nine years.' --The Book of Taliesen,
tr Gwengvryn Evans (1915)

"Albus cunctorum quondam captator bonorum
Orbis in excidio minus ambitione laborat?"
('Albus, grasping eagerly all the honors of the
state, is he any less ambitious in this universal
catastrophe?') --St Paulinus of Beziers, 'Claudii
Marii Victoris [sic] de perversis suae aetatis moribus'
in: Early Christian Latin Poets, Otto Kuhn-
muench (1929)

'I know that the Telchines, who are ignorant and
no friends of the Muse, grumble at my poetry...'
--Callimachus, Aetia bk I, fragment 1

'Poet is angry against poet to the point of
assaulting him.' --Callimachus, fr 203 (Iambus
xiii)

'Purity of heart is to will one thing.' --Kierkegaard

I found out, Heraclitus, how long you had been dead;
you weren't that sad philosopher, but a satellite of the Pleiade.
Unless there's lurking, somewhere in the desert, bits we've missed,
your "Nightingales" are gone as though they never did exist.

3 13 86

"Mit der Dummheit kampfen
Gotter selbst vergebens." --Schiller, Jungfrau von Orleans
III vi ('Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.')

'Many are the thyrsus-bearers, few the initiated.' --Greek
Anthology x.106

'We are all kept and fed for death, like a herd of swine to
be slain without reason.' --Palladas [the whole poem, x.85]

"Nam fuit & fortassis erit felicius euum;
in medium sordes." --Petrarch ('For there has been and perhaps
will be a happier age; inbetween there is squalor.')

   "The Warning

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk--as strange, as still--
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?"

--Adelaide Crapsey

'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing,
for all that is cometh from unreason.' --Glycon,
x.125 tr Paten

'Hunger puts an end to love, or if not hunger,
time. But if neither of these put out the fire, the only
cure left for you is to hang yourself.' --Crates ix.497

73. 'With what joy in front
Of the executioner I walk
That from my shadow the head
Is two steps ahead of my feet...' --Asadullah Khan
Ghalib [1797-1869], tr Ahmed Ali (1973)

18. '...It is not even possible for man
To become man....' --Ghalib

68. '...This fire is not confined to earth...'
--Mohammed Taqi Mir [1723-1810], ibid

36. 'I did see the moth go up
To the lighted candle,
Then nothing else besides
A startled flame.
The life of the company
Was only a wink;
The cup departed taking
With it the eye-bedewed.
If a hundred roses bloomed
It mattered not;
How long ago was it
That I went to the garden?' --Mir

75. 'One day I walked into the shop of those who blow the glass
And asked: O makers of the cup, have you perchance a glass
Shaped like the heart? they laughed and said: Thou wanderest in vain,
O Mir; each cup thou seest, round or oval, every glass
was once a heart that we have melted on the fire and blown
Into a cup. That's all thou seest here, there is no glass.' --Mir

58. 'If one has the eye this world
Is like a house of mirrors:
Within the walls the face
Is visible...' --Mir

41. 'The clanking of the chain is now
Not heard, nor seen the flocks
Of gazelles. The desert seethed with life
But only during my madness...' --Mir

5. '...Who has the heart to hear/ the tale of Mir?
The mood of the company/ is strange and grim.'

A refined pleasure: noticing the ironic
juxtaposition of unlike books by the shelving
procedure. But seldom am i objective enough
to feel this in the presence of personality
clashes, which are really no different in origin.
These always seem like emblems of
destruction...

So you think you're the only alien? every human
is an alien on Planet Cancer--and we blame
ourselves for not fitting in.

The dogma that the Real is the True denies the
experience of Transcendence, in which the self
becomes more True but less Real. --But
the dogma that the Real is never the True, denies
the experience of being in Love, when they coincide.

...our lives are precarious
as those ancient tenements
that totter into dust
at the slam of a door

nor is our faith firmer
nor is our word
nor our deeds--
we are free radicals

changes on the way to something stable

3 19 86

"These slums where wild illusions pullulate" --Emil
Verch

Attitudinizing: expressing opinions in order to
reinforce within oneself a certain outlook, instead of
communicating an idea to others or discovering an
insight previously unknown. You have to realize that
every point of view, however reasonable and complete
it seems to be, is subject to change from new information
or deeper understanding; that this continual transform-
ation is desirable and to resist it for no other reason
than fatigue is Accidie (spiritual inertia) not self
protection; that it is no use to express opinions to
others at all, because they already have those: what
they need is knowledge & techniques.

"It may seem too much to say that ignorance was
the curse of the Romantic poets. But certainly
characteristics that distinguished them from major
figures before their time include impatience, super-
ficiality, a false cult of originality, a tendency to
improvise rather than think. They shared the belief
that a man could dissociate himself from the society
of his time and still say things relevant to it." --Philip
Hobsbaun, Tradition and Experiment in English
Poetry (1979)

"There also now exists a sizeable American following
for every religious sect in the world, not excluding
denominations which were thought to be extinct..."
--André Kukla

"...philosophy is, among the serious intellectual
disciplines, probably the most fashion prone..."
--Michael Tanner

   "The better poet
Claimed eleven grounds of love,
   The worse twelve trillion."
--Jeremy Morse (in Word Ways)

"The whole history of earlier Alexandrianism, a
steady laborious poetical movement which went
on at full pressure for something like half a century,
is the history of an attempt to bring poetry back into
touch with life, to reinstate it as a living art." --J W
Mackail

The centrifugal force that pulls people apart, as long
as it remains ascendant, makes every awkward &
discordant connection necessary. The trick is not to
overestimate what immediate good will come of it.

"America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe."
--Thomas M Disch

Once again we got the Aperture edition of
my favorite photographer Wynn Bullock--&
once again i had to price it out of my reach...

A new book by Gore Vidal! (via Metafilter)

"Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds." --Technorati (via Boing Boing)

Finally caught up with Bruce Sterling's blog again.

Useful anti-Bukowski rant. (via Bookslut)

Now if i could just find the terzanelle i wrote
about this...

I keep meaning to explore all of Dallas painter
Dwayne Carter's website. He seems to have
seamlessly melded the old & the new medium
into something really idiosyncratic. (via JR)

"As to the shortfall of troops, I have a solution. Now that even the Turks – who were eager to get their mits on northern Iraq and deal with their Kurdish "problem" once and for all – have been dissuaded from showing up at the party, and long troop deployments are playing havoc with the lives of our reservists, why don't we invite the Israelis to contribute some of their troops to the occupation?
They, after all, are so much better at humiliating Arabs than we are. Why should all that accumulated experience – leveling homes and businesses, and inflicting collective punishment – go to waste? As our loyal ally, they would no doubt be more than glad to sacrifice their own sons and daughters in this dirty little war.
After all, we started it on their behalf."
–Justin Raimondo

Listening to: my Stylistics 45's.

My "Gestapo rescue" book would have to
be my Webster's 2nd Unabridged. I know what's
in the others...

"The fatal Sisters three,
which spun my slender twine,
Knew well how rotten was the yarne,
from whence they drew their line."
--Gascoigne

"The oftener sene, the more I lust,
the more I lust, the more I smart,
the more I smart, the more I trust,
the more I trust, the heavyer hart,
the hevy hart breedes myne unrest,
thy absence therfore, lyke I best..."
--Googe

"Her face, her tongue, her wit
  so fair, so sweet, so sharp
first drew, then bent, last knit
  mine eye, mine ear, my heart..."
--Arthur Gorges (#79)

"Spencer, in affecting the Ancients writ no language."
--Ben Jonson

"When, in praising a poet, it is said that he has 'found
his own voice', what is usually meant is that he has
developed a manner of self-dramatization sufficiently
consistent that a single persona seems to be the source
of all his poems. 'Voice' in this sense equates with a
manner of delivery, a stance, a style that the audience
may not share but that it can at least recognize..."
--Thomas Disch (in The Nation)
[nowadays we use the word branding for this]

"Next to zucchini squash, poetry must be the most
overproduced commodity in the world." --Judson
Jerome, 1980

I can stand humidity and i can stand stupidity but i
can't stand humidity plus stupidity.

People are starting to ignore driving etiquette as
they do precise punctuation. On one level, it's the
haste of desperation; on another, the false sovereignty
of an individualism for which anything not coerced
can be instantly jettisoned.

To be lonely is to experience solitude as a victim.

   "Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat

Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

--Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957)

"Legend has it that Julius Caesar invented the art of
reading silently." --Thomas Winter

" 'I have never been prouder of my profession,' he
remarks, 'than when my friend Dorothy Day (the
Catholic pacifist) told me of something that happened
when she did some time in the Women's House of
Detention. Each prisoner was taken out to be bathed
once a week. Dorothy shared a cell with a whore and,
when the time came, Dorothy's cellmate was led off
toward the shower chanting a line from Auden:
"Thousands have lived without love, not one without
water".' " --In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety,
Alan Levy (1983) [interviews w/ A.]

I think it'd be wise to assume from now on that none of
my ideas is truly new or unique but that my perceptions
may very well be--though i tend to believe the converse.
An insight is first a perception: and by conceptualizing
it it passes through a prism of language in which some
qualities are bound to be lost, and conventional ones
added. A due respect for ideas will acknowledge the
tragedy of their birth. A due respect for the moment
will seek not spontaneity but openness to grace.

"It's perfectly all right to be an engagé writer
as long as you don't think you're changing things.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead...
but the social and political history of Europe would be
exactly the same if Dante and Shakespeare and Mozart
had never lived." --Auden loc cit [What about Langland?]

Barbarians oversimplify into banality, decadents overelaborate
into obfuscation. High culture means clarity in complexity.

"Even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poeme."
--Ben Jonson, Discoveries