"The task of every other slave has an end. The rower in time reaches the port; the lexicographer at last finds the conclusion of the alphabet; only the hapless wit has its labour always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied, and one jest only raises expectation of another." --The Rambler, 141.
"..and every Maori to this day knows the name of the canoe his ancestors arrived in." --Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory (1993)
The hardest, most intractable iron of all: human language.
"Hubert: It is a fearful and tempestuous time,
The concave firmament, the angel's bridge
O'er the world's day and night, is visibly
Bowed down and bent beneath its load of thunder,
And through the fiery fissures of the clouds
Glistens the warfare of armed elements,
Bellowing defiance in earth's stunned ear,
And setting midnight on the throne of day.
Huntsman: The roar has ceased; the hush of intercalm
Numbs with its leaden finger Echo's lips,
And angry spirits in mid havoc pause,
Premeditating ruin in their silence."
--Beddoes, The Brides' Tragedy
"...Hell, to my affliction,
Is mere snow-water."
--John Webster
"Even an author whose works were popular--such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library; such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama since the Beggar's Opera--was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog." --Macaulay's Life of Johnson
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to maintain the illusion that things are being done & they can only be done this way, while actually preventing anything from ever happening.
"Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, 'Come!'
Lovely in dye and fan,
A-tremble in shimmering grace,
A moth from her winter swoon
Uplifts her face:
Stares from her glamorous eyes;
Wafts her on plumes like mist;
In ecstasy swirls and sways
To her strange tryst."
--Walter de la Mare
The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.
"Vaporwave is like being stuck somewhere between a math textbook cover and an existential crisis." --@DrunkNotIAm
"I HAVE NO HOME
I follow the road
nowhere goes to,
the one somewhere
comes from.
If I passed here before,
wore a path into the stone
other than my own,
ignore that fetish form.
On the staircase
each tier vibrates as
the desire to descend
contends with the urge
to awake.
In that same dark
where the groundfloor gets lost
the upper story
may find its way."
--Bill Knott
"To me there is nothing better than a damp, grey day, and a damp, grey mist, and greyness all about me, and freedom to become a part of it." --@IComptonBurnett
○□○□.
"...cheval-de-frise,--jagged pieces of bottleglass in brown, green, and clear--mortared into the tops of the low walls around the Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting." --Telex from Cuba
(my webster's unabridged tells me this derives from the spiked poles laid out by the Frieslanders [who had no horses] against the invading 17c Spaniards...)
before the dawn, neon thirty-seven
near Mapleshade, neon thirty-seven
my frail librarian fleeing from the war
when wars were numbered, neon thirty-seven
cycles of broken seasons sometimes pause
& the cry lulls, neon thirty-seven
Graywyvern finds no end to debt, but solves
diff'rent crimes, neon thirty-seven
unhoused spirit
now between the Bardos
returned dead parrot
unhoused spirit
the rest of us must pirate
frith on the froth-slung borders
unhoused spirit
now between the Bardos
"Was its impact soporific? or hallucinatory? or hypnotic? To this day nobody knows." --Adair's Perec
"The Leaves Are Falling
Here I am saying 'The leaves are falling'
—one of those choruses
that vie with interminable verses
to mock hoarders.
Yeah, we get
that a palette of winds
is a pretty thing:
one blurs the anther, another
the river splurging on riprap,
expunging
phosphates,
out of the temperature
differential building
sculptural fogs
that promenade
between shores a glacier
wedged ajar, a fjord.
Whatever gives the river
its seriousness reverses
in the light
of those clouds moving
as if absorbing
their pomp in advance of it—
characters
which untied the painter
and took the sculls again."
--Ange Mlinko
"This sea in the sea hath a Sea of waggon,
And a Sea of waggon of blood; For all what hath not come
With it hath fallen, And as a waggon of blood the waggon
And the blood is flowing out of that waggon." --GPT-2
"...to join with others to shape a future is the holiest act." --The City in the Middle of the Night
"a large tree
uprooted in a windstorm
during the night -
walking on, I consider
the things I cling to"
--Jane E. Wilson in Tanka Splendor 2002
"Before long, the folly was to become too desperate, too disastrous, too wrecking a business to be a comic show even to the most amused eyes; the circus was, all too soon, to go smash, and the folly of the clowns who had helped to smash it became bitterness, and the idiot's tale held too much of sound and fury to be borne. But these first-Georgian years were, to Rome [a character], twinkling with bland absurdity." --Told by an Idiot (1923)
"If read in the tanzil order of revelation, the Quran sounds like an apocalypse; if read in the order of the mushaf, the Quran sounds like an epic." --Todd Lawson, The Quran: Epic and Apocalypse (2017)
"SONG (Aelindrome in Pi)
314159
O, velvet song!
It comes now, long.
It covets love."
--Etherin
Danse...
Year Zero
not even Year One
reads Belshazzar
Year Zero
zircon alizarin
in this captivating wine
Year Zero
not even Year One
Truth is me with the Red Rock.
the rain is a separate country
and people vanish
more completely than cars from our lives
the Doppler-bug of the deadwhite fan
reeling in clusters just at sunset
between life & death
no coin for the ferryman
Cold Spring has turned into a sad wet summer.
"...a blood road back to the moon..." --Caitlin Kiernan
"And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things--must we not all have already existed[?]" --Common's Nietzsche, 46
Air, dreamed...
glissade · ring
of the cylinder empty
one brings so many snapshots
to the photo session
before the light revives
sib
but to what end
not any more known
but as knowing knows
as the light degrades
what color star
should the creatives wear
which fell olpe's in store
what · color star
AIs administer
more of the way we were
what color star
should the creatives wear
" 'Oh, must we be quite so honest with ourselves, my dear?' 'We do not know how to avoid it,' said Terence. 'That is why there is horror in every heart, and a resolve never to be honest with anyone else.' " --Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders & Betters (1944)
"I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind." --The Rings of Saturn
vas dib busai ji
e helilat harogi
qoisu troutou pebenda
yole das selas
yoyayendi renrauga
( 'it's hot & so/ the souvenir remains/ that has the shape// of a dry shell/ it presents challenges' )
"I build houses that I will not inhabit."
"Ghost Nets
Pale syllables drift
through the ear, reticulate
and mercurial
as moonlight’s ladder
glitching across the water:
skeletal rigging
of a doomed schooner
crewed by the damned, the phantom
lace of mermaids who
have evanesced to
bone-white spindrift, foam
scudding leeward; un-
canny descant of
whales braiding down the spiral
Fibonacci stair-
case of the hollowed
nautilus; sea dingle of
the eldritch sea witch,
her garden of stings
and fleshy polyps crisscrossed
with neon wiggles,
the trireme’s open
rib cage spilling amphorae
checkered with coin light;
or do they involve,
instead, the waterlogged souls
of drowned migrants locked
in the rust bucket’s
vomitous hold—mothers and
minors, cohort of
seventeen-year-olds
held for ransom by smugglers
till families paid
four thousand a head
for their sons’ passage to no-
where, the deepest trench
off sandy Pylos,
to be chum, sea-worm mumbled,
queasy shades thridding
wakes of superyachts
and ferryboats sardined with
red blistered tourists?
Yet they’re real: frayed webs
of nylon filaments cut
loose to sleepwalk like
zombies through the seas
snaring loggerhead turtles,
dolphins, birds, squid, fish,
claws, scales, cartilage,
ghastly trash. What’s ghosted is
the future: oceans
of unlife, grimed and
slimy, starved, hypoxic, bath-
water warm. Drastic
measures are needed,
they’ve been saying, as long as
I can remember,
making their plastic
promises. It went sour in
my lifetime, children:
something untangles
and comes undone, but not the
concatenated
undecomposing
mesh of permanent slaughter.
We watched it happen."
--A E Stallings
"I question whether a ghost needs hallucinatory weed to hallucinate more than he is already doing, but he likes to smoke them." --Annals of Klepsis
"...the greatest five minutes in the recent history of film ..."
"Prison was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity died immediately, without protest." --Rubicon Beach (1986)
"Viking Spring
This: barley green as grass
swaying in gusty May;
its clouds of brandished blades.
This: ghost-blurs from the coast,
hoar-brained crows cawing, haar
fingering the halting
hearts and limbs of lambs
willed to life on the hill.
And this: wing-whirr of geese,
wind-arrows in narrow
formation confirming
sea-currents still foment
their baleful heat, hot blood
and gold-greed still breed in
the mind; sea-wolves still found
fine steel in hearts: yours; mine."
--Ian Crockatt
"The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions" --Hart Crane
"Seria sola sal, Sinead;
ida, en islas a los aires." --@MerlinaAcevedo
These dark woods strayed amidst,
no turning likelier than another,
my signals multiply-Hertz'd
these dark woods strayed. Amidst
such fathoms filched
came to a great merle there,
these dark woods. Strayed amidst
no turning likelier than. Another?
"...Regal crimson court stands
corbie-clad in mourning;
noble gift-friend fallen
fell Death's thegn has slain him.
Sword trees white girth'd sturdy
stumble adzed like lumber;
wine-dark drink of war hawks
wends to pools unending.
Death-thane thrives on darkness
delves for souls twelve score
Rannveig's great sword righteous
raised gainst death's blade saves us..."
--Thomas Ireland-Delfs, "Dróttkvætt or That Old Norse Poetry Thing"
The Blame Game confers a finality that mere cause-&-effect lacks.
"3.
When the best student is told about the way,
It is barely within his power to practise it;
When the average student is told about the way,
It seems to him one moment there and gone the next;
When the worst student is told about the way,
He laughs out loud at it.
If he did not laugh at it
It would not have been good enough to be the way..."
--Lau's Tao te Ching
"THE CITY (Palindrome-Haiku)
Go flat, urbanised....
A cradle here held arcades
in a brutal fog."
--Anthony Etherin
We claim to uphold the sanctity of the individual, but in practice our autonomy is highly contingent; only the will to coerce stands sovereign, in the world of bad hierarchies, bad faith, & bad reasons.
"That is when I officially lost my mind and also became afraid of the size of the sky."
I said if writing a poem is like juggling, translating a poem is like juggling a live animal.
" 'You want me to write for you?'
'Absolutely,' I said."
Troy. Not just this song but this performance of this song gives me chills. Her emotion fills this whole space.
"The idea of a messenger is a mistake, a necessary mistake." --Michael Cisco, Unlanguage (2018)
I Am Stretched On Your Grave. Also.
"Poem XCII
You took the lamp, but the light remained with me. Or something more subtle and tenuous, like the shadow of the light."
--Dulce Maria Loynaz, Poems Without Name (1953; tr Harret de Onis, 1993)
I think i would've loved to major in what has come to be called "Translation Studies", where misunderstandings are the starting point in every issue, & "transparency" is what faster-than-light is to physics, a fairy tale. But i turned away from a career as an actual working translator, because i'd been overly impressed with the idea that words in different languages are completely not interconvertible (Latin being my chief unfortunate example): a "chien" is not a "Hund" is not a "dog" even though they are apparently used for the same things; in German, a dog is part of the class of things-that-can-be-kicked, like a football, while in France a French poodle can be higher than a German professor; in Spanish "puto" is far lower than "perro"... In that view, i would have to know every word in a language before i could translate it truthfully; more, i'd have to live in the exact country where it was used. Later i came to understand how social attitudes can be lifted out of their verbal matrix.
This reminds me, however, of an old notion of mine that, i think, is still worth pursuing. Each language has what might be called its polar axis, or a dichotomy that orders many of its concepts. German's is clean/dirty, but French is elite/vulgar. I suppose Spanish must be masculine-hard vs feminine-soft. Maybe Russian is holy/unholy (overlaid with its Francophile Enlightenment that is only skin-deep): such that only in St Petersburg did Symbolist poems become both secret (elite) AND holy... America? Clearly, popular/unpopular, but with much confusion, since every other binary has been superimposed (often carelessly), till even those of an analytical bent can't decide where a word should go... Sex is popular & fun but also dirty (& healthy?), but matrimony & babies are holy; children are pure. (--I'm sure the more i play this game, the more nonsensical the results.)
--England, of course, is U & non-U, as was figured out long ago.
"Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime."
"Dudes who stare at me like I’m some exotic specimen always look like they we[r]e dressed by their mom." --@mckenziewark
"The Meissen's ware has expired, its passage is written in oppidan stone. Maillol may neither force the standard clay. The corporeality of the earth is imperiled, its sedimentary cup filed with incommodious libation, with the Segercone of industries tear, basalts with biscuit leaves constitutes lead procaine. The Geyser's Panicum languishes in the chlorine silt, its delicate stem immersed in a poison communion with the challis of aphoristic ground. To the precursors mouth assume the primordial faience, the historical requiem of fragrant arboretums."
--Kristin Ryling
bruised by the real, here
in air conditioned comfort
cafΓ© au lait time
one-oh-nine in Rome fades, like
smoke alarm i figured out
