the gyring, pustulent light
invades our hearts' sleep
in Normandies of terrible will
not to be singled out on the plain of glass

indigo
the last thing
to ask in the proffered glass
all shaven each craven at witch sleep

this policy was now an adopted thing
dark die bitter steal
tanks in the street of draped indigo
the driver's face a cipher

soft freezing rain will
follow this
burden or flutter mysteriously light
as the winners steal

07 08 04

Poem by poem t'ward wit-eclipse
A pro-war bard is losing steam.
The Muses have deserted him...
Could be the company he keeps.

   07 07 04

"Reading Spengler is like watching Romanticism train wreck into Modernism."

"The earliest poets were pretty small."

Children at Abu Ghraib.

in the burning glass
there is never any sleep
& the tremulous shadows of indigo
enfold, soundlessly, each broken thing

let free will
in the house of glass
scatter no more hazard light
let the mother of mutterings sleep

who, pursuing the procurator since this
very steal
& beginning to be legible cipher
have not required this

crystal mutiny peace light
binary stroke & fragrant cipher
say what will
be will be say svelte drogulus steal

07 07 04


burning indigo
Titan's sleep
path of crushed snails questioned thing
quadrangular immovable oneway glass

the juicy murder trial thing
still picking out glass
whose ghastly hope spoke of indigo
desert sleep

crystal do them desert woke with the same will
someday soon will steal
slag from light
in the haunted burgundy cipher

spasmodic eyes siphon this
cellcam ban phlogiston sleepwalker cipher
avalanche lungfish fetch this
star you cannot steal

07 07 04

our night of repairs the will
does not change, pellucid indigo
no longer the light
to divide gray thing from barely grayer thing

silken this
regard of nacreous glass
pure cipher
returning as marrows filled not sleep

another redundant door outside where steal
away the blown light
the ashen stars of a final will
sleepwalker to this

utter army indigo
obeisance any flash or flicker cipher
purblind thing
rains before dawn steal

07 06 04

"...the greatest single expanse of unexplored territory remaining in the Solar System today."

A contemporary Russian painter.

I was reading a Blok poem, or sequence of poems, in which some of the endwords repeated across poems; & though it was an unrhymed translation of what was surely a rhymed original, the effect pleased me & i wanted to utilize the form in a sequence of my own. Accordingly, i took the approximate dimensions of Blok’s sequence (five 16-line poems of four stanzas each), &
determined that a “super-sestina” of nine endwords would fill 81 lines (one stray line left over)--in which each 16-line unit would have 7 endwords repeating & 9 not. The first step was to
find or construct a Latin square, i.e. a matrix of nine rows of the digits 1 through 9, in which no row or column repeated a number. I could have easily found one on the internet, but i decided to construct my own. First, i took the sequence 1-9-2-8-3-7-4-6-5 as the base i would use, & after writing out this square:

   1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9
   9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
   8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7
   7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6
   6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5
   5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4
   4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3
   3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2
   2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1

i reordered the rows according to my base (slightly disarranged):

   1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9
   2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1
   9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8
   3-4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2
   8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6-7
   4-5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3
   7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5-6
   5-6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4
   6-7-8-9-1-2-3-4-5

& then the columns:

   1-9-2-8-3-7-4-6-5
   2-1-3-9-4-8-5-7-6
   9-8-1-7-2-6-3-5-4
   3-2-4-1-5-9-6-8-7
   8-7-9-6-1-5-2-4-3
   4-3-5-2-6-1-7-9-8
   7-6-8-5-9-4-1-3-2
   5-4-6-3-7-2-8-1-9
   6-5-7-4-8-3-9-2-1

which gives me my final matrix. What words to use? I scanned my Gmatria lists--

56 light, Marx, will, radix, ghoti, zebub, Odinn, Karnak, sigil, this, iron, Latin, Denebola, udjat, Agharta, ether, shit, hobbit, qoph, Isis, daimon, cannibal, lgorab, abort, term, poet,
comet, wolf

57 ions, suq, Lapis, Apsu, Banus, Cipango, vugg, grackle, Gemini, rose, cipher, moon, hylic, callais, aether, Ziv, sleep, wood, steal, lingo

58 science, night, Kakkabu, Cathay, ullage, smegma, emerald, thing, star, fragile, glass, calendar, zodiac, rune, indigo, Marfik, Aldebaran, guano, Schedar, Amerika, arts, upadana,
reading, drive, hazard

& picked out:
       will
      light
      this
      cipher
      steal
      sleep
      glass
      thing
      indigo

which become my endwords 1 through 9. Now all i have to do is write these poems:

will-indigo-light-thing/this-glass-cipher-sleep/steal-light-will-this/indigo-cipher-thing-steal

glass-sleep-indigo-thing/will-glass-light-sleep/this-steal-cipher-this/light-cipher-will-steal

indigo-sleep-thing-glass/thing-glass-indigo-sleep/will-steal-light-cipher/this-cipher-this-steal

light-sleep-will-glass/indigo-thing-glass-sleep/thing-steal-indigo-cipher/will-this-light-steal

cipher-sleep-this-glass/light-thing-will-indigo/sleep-steal-glass-cipher/thing-this-indigo-light

will. I will probably use "snowflakes"...

‘Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected.’ --Mandelstam

For the Fourth, we decided to celebrate that most American value--freedom of speech--by going to see Fahrenheit 9/11. --Afterwards, the audience applauded.



“The decision to read a text as a fiction rather than a historical utterance neatly solves the problem of the Khlebnikov legend by setting it in its proper fictive domain, but the link between the legend and the biography can subvert this critical strategy. Consider, for example, the message Khlebnikov inscribed on a postcard and mailed to his friend Dmitry Petrovsky shortly after being drafted. He wrote, ‘The king is out of luck, the king is under lock and key. Infantry Regiment 93 will be the death of the child in me. Address: Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, Co. 2, 93rd Inf. Reg. (Res.).’ If we choose to read those lines as a poem, we automatically activate a particular set of literary conventions: we mark out a quatrain by virtue of the meter and rhyme, ignore everything from the word ‘Address’ on, and posit a finished lyrical miniature replete with allusions to the imprisoned king of fairy tales and to a variety of literary texts. The poem is rich enough to create the contexts we need, not only to make sense of the poem but to make the poem satisfy us aesthetically. There is no need, in other
words, to identify the lyrical ‘I’ with the historical Khlebnikov outside the text. On the other hand, a nonfictive or ‘historical’ reading is equally plausible. Petrovsky writes in his memoirs
that when he received the postcard he gasped with surprse and ran off to his friends to see what could be done to get Khlebnikov discharged as soon as possible. Clearly he read the poem as nonfictive discourse, taking the poem’s lyrical subject to be a real person with a serious problem on his hands. His was undoubtedly an impoverished reading of the text, but not without merit.” --Paul Schmidt, pref. to Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, v. III (1997)

‘...whoever does not understand the new has no comprehension of the past, and whoever comprehends the past must also understand the new. The whole tragedy arises when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get “yesterday.” This “yesterday” is easily understood poetry, a hen-house with a fence, a cosy little corner where domestic fowl cluck and peck about. This is not work done upon the word but rather respite from the word.’ --Mandelstam, in: The Silver Age of Russian Culture, ed Proffer & Proffer (1975)

More machine intelligence from Yahoo (note the sponsored links).