Saturday, April 09, 2005

    "57

My most. My most. O my lost!
O my bright, my ineradicable ghost.
At whose bright coast God seeks
Shelter and is lost is lost. O
Coast of Brightness. O cause of
Grief. O rose of purest grief.
O thou in my breast so stark and
Light. Me. Me. My own perfidy.
O my most my most. O the bright
The beatiful the terrible Accost."

--Jos* Garcia Villa


Goodby* Gut*nb*rg.


Friday, April 08, 2005

"Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability." (via M*tafilt*r)


"Mythologies are dodgy things. By 'mythologies' I mean nothing more than the picture languages that we invent to embody and make accessible to casual reference the deeper shared understandings which keep us intact as a group--so far as we are intact as a group.
   In an intact group the pool of shared understandings is like a shared bank account of the group wealth. Each member has instant access to the whole deposit. Since it is spiritual or psychological wealth, it does not diminish by being spent. Rather, the more lavishly it is circulated, the greater inner wealth and 'security' each single member feels to have. Intercommunication of those deeper shared understandings, through the tokens of the mythology that represents them, strengthens the unified inner life of the group.
   ...When the shared group understanding of all members is complete then a mere touching of the tokens of their mythology is enough for complete communication. Each verbal signal illuminates--with the voltage of the whole group’s awareness and energy--those members of the group who exchange it. ...In those circumstances, language can be said to be full of meaning. Hence the answer of the old Hopi woman to the Anthropologist who asked why Hopi songs are so short. 'Our songs are short' she said, 'because we know so much.' " --Hugh*s


Thursday, April 07, 2005

Wishful thinking jabs a third-class twig.
Kidnap plutocrat.
Ostracism winds a hoary slag.
Kidnap pilgrim.

Plush offal would tallow your droshky
Waist-high. Wishful loom
Of folly origami distinct
From indigo...

Ugrian tinfoil amobng our thick
Napalm wings a swag.
What but folly crawling days blatant
With wintry snick

Grotto. It's a black fly in your Corvair.


Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Dim bulbs not so bad?


"The poet's only hope is to be infinitely sensitive to what his gift is, and this in itself seems to be another gift that few poets possess. According to this sensitivity, and to his faith in it, he will go on developing as a poet, as Yeats did, pursuing those adventures, mental, spiritual and physical, whatever they may be, that his gift wants. Or he will lose its guidance, lose the feel of its touch in the workings of his mind, and soon be absorbed by the impersonal lumber of matters in which his gift has no interest, which is a form of suicide, metaphorical in the case of Coleridge, actual in the case of Mayakovsky.
   Many considerations assault his faith in the finality, wisdom and sufficiency of his gift. Its operation is not only shadowy and indefinable, it is intermittent. It has none of the obvious attachment to publicly exciting and seemingly important affairs that his other mental activities have and in which all his intelligent contemporaries have such confidence, and so it receives no immediate encouragement--or encouragement only of the most dubious kind, as a flagellant, questioning his illuminations, might be encouraged by a bunch of mad old women and some other half-dead gory flagellant." --Hugh*s


Tuesday, April 05, 2005

    "Jaguar Witch"

1.
song
turning roar soft
hour wind how ask was
sun color mud
go

2.
story
cold across
and shadow moon

3.
turning
shadow am
throw with plum
a thousand
shall

4.
story
cold across
and still moon

5.
your shadow falls
and i know you and
across this blind plain growing
blind with your cold shadow

and what shall i say to you
now what gain
you so far from anything
i could clasp or fail to

6.
will shall cannot moon
now told in small words
arrogantly this wisp
rock solid pass

no chiaroscuro
icy gnomon
and if dust hangs in our black sky
at all, it will not land

7.
do float not
a sad shard of risp
coign
kingdom
smoky crown

arrogantly this words




"Apparently a minor Polish poet named Karol Wojtyla died over the weekend. Wojtyla published poems as a young man in Poland and wrote a dissertation on the 16-century Spanish mystical poet Juan de Yepes (better known in the English-speaking world as Saint John of the Cross). He went on to become head of a large international organization, but never abandoned poetry altogether. He published several books of poetry using the pen name "Pope John Paul II." Among the admirers of Wojtlya's poetry was Polish Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who praised him for his "dogmaticism." Reaction to the death of this poet in literary circles was muted. Ron Silliman has pointed out that the great tragedy of Wojtyla's poetry was his inability "to make the turn to language." " --B*msha Swing


"When we speak of Chaucer as the ‘fountain undefiled’ of English poetry’s delicacy, or of Beowulf as the buried reservoir of English poetry’s strength, we are probably glossing over the fact that these two have spent so much of their time, to change the metaphor, like male and female spiders, trying to avoid or paralyze each other, and that the good moments have come only where they have managed an electrified, always precarious coupling." --Hugh*s, op cit


Monday, April 04, 2005

"In the sixties, the Yugoslav Serb poet Vasko Popa wrote a powerful cycle of poems about the Serbian national Saint: St Sava of the Wolves. The Serbs are St Sava's wolves. During the seventies he told me that whenever he gave a public reading in Yugoslavia, students would begin to shout out, demanding the wolf poems, and then when he read them would become wildly excited--so much that he was alarmed and puzzled. I asked him what he thought it meant and he said: 'I don't know. But I fear--very bad things.' " --T*d Hugh*s, Wint*r Poll*n (1994)

Two yarons now i'm doing this blog...

On my victrola: Nils P*tt*r Molva*r- Khm*r


Sunday, April 03, 2005

On my victrola: Das Rh*ingold.

    "The death of Cornstalk

Triune Algol: gull, blackbird, pigeon
time, or such sequence
as wings carry. Scatterlings, I cling
to skyey outlines
sight traced and sight wants to deliquesce."

--*lm*r Moriarty, H*r* is th* Information You R*qu*st*d (1966)


Saturn's
auroras; halos
whirl; convoy days.