"...the art world these days sometimes seems like nothing but evil clowns..."
"a cry's return is leaving in the ruse" --Stray Arts
knowing all the chords
even the secret ones set down
in cloud sojourn
high cerulean shrouds
discerpting dark & spongy black
& shaken talc
palindrome in brads
subject · to the laws of torque
"Scott Moncrieff's Beowulf
In the curdled afterglow of night
The long ship leaves the cliff, the ness, the cave;
Unending arcs of icy light
Flicker about her on the climbing wave;
And coming close fierce warriors crowd
To shout across the Swan's Way. See! They pass.
She drives through trailing veils of cloud,
And time pours down like rain on weeping glass."
--Charles Spear
"Edda, edgeless amnesia..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"I keg a million liter acid ewer." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"The Disinherited
They cared for nothing but the days and hours
Of freedom, and in silent scorn
Ignored the worldly watchers and the powers,
Left staples shattered and uptorn,
Filed window-bars and dynamited towers.
What was their wisdom whom no vice could hold?
Remote as any gipsy rover,
They stared along the cliffs, mauve fold on fold,
And watched the bees fly over.
From velvet hills, trees in the riverbed,
From glassy reefs in skeins of foam,
They reared the shell of vision and of words unsaid
To be their haunting and their earthly home."
--Charles Spear
"The Tomb of Edgar Poe
Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.
Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.
The wars of earth and heaven--O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,
Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter."
--Wilbur's Mallarmé
Actual footage of the tangle of thoughts inside my brain 🪼🪼.
"It is important to see that fascism is a disease, as catching as influenza; we all when tired and disillusioned have fascist moments, when belief in human nature vanishes, when we burn with anger and envy like the underdog and the sucker, when we hate the virtuous and despise the weak, when we feel as Goebbels permanently feels, that all fine sentiment is ballyhoo, that we are the dupes of our leaders, and that the masses are evil, to be resisted with the cruelty born of fear. This is the theological sin of despair, a Haw-Haw moment which quickly passes, but which fascism has made permanent, and built up into a philosophy. In every human being there is a Lear and a fool, a hero and a clown who comes on the stage and burlesques his master. He should never be censored, but neither be allowed to rule." --Cyril Connolly, in: Writers of World War II
"I’m so stealing the opening of this as a Vaporwave sample."
❖ ── ✦ ──『🟩』── ✦ ── ❖
❖ .Giant Cube Factory. ❖
❖ ── ✦ ──『🟩』── ✦ ── ❖.
"You bet, I bless every eye boot." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
a funny feeling
after so long to cross
a long barricaded place
now freed of those encumbrances
& i think of the flesh sea
so many times pierced
by tumult & interpolations
& ongoing
its roll of tides
"I worked out what 'fēlēs' and 8 other words would look like if they had survived ."
"ATLANTIS WISHED
Within sad slate,
wind halts a site.
The island waits,
sans tidal white.
Awe hits its land—
At dawn, this isle
tilts wise a hand.
It stands awhile.
In wash, last tide,
the sand it wails.
Wan salt, it hides
its wit and shale.
Its death in laws,
it lies and thaws."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"A moot tattoo, saliva, crow as a bird..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"Many a fez I abrogate..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"Can There Even be Such a Thing as Vaporwave Literature?"
not my spider weaving
stopped the wind
centipede elixir leaned
into my half-living
pale ontologist
keep moving when the wind stops
[Oh, yeah, my source for cloud microplastics...]
"REGISTERED TRADEMARK
Mysterious measurements left the house
so empty that all the other houses
have been permitted to pervade it.
Only compared to the sniffing of a dog
trapped in a cupboard, your curiosity
will never deepen to desperation still.
Like a bus bound for crosses laid church-wise
over fallow parents, you barter-gather a land
bladderspasm sculpture has bared before.
You warm your hands at your feet. A swarm
of central materials comes to harm you.
Face to face, god what imperatives of glove.
T-shirt worn backwards to appease mirrors
with a logo/slogan whose moral is familiar
if we could somehow get in there to read it."
--Bill Knott, 2014
Animated flickers in a real-looking desert scene.
"Sad itinerary names, sofas, mussels." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"Droll Lord Aberdeen." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"old farmer
snaps his suspenders . . .
fly moves an inch"
--RG Rader
"I don’t want to be the city that tore down a Frank Lloyd Wright."
microplastic in the clouds
& in the rainbow
other shrift precludes
microplastic in the clouds
the loser's accolades
alike on orc & caribou
microplastic in the clouds
& in the rainbow
"Ennui Part II -
The Ground Under Sisyphus (palindrome)
I unnest egg,
arc an even rut,
pull a ball or pull organ.
I’m lack’s ample hill.
Atone– not all I help!
Mask calm, I nag–
'Roll up. Roll a ball up. Turn…'
Even a crag
gets ennui."
--@Spoonerrhythms
Remembering...that snowstorm on a comet.
"back and forth
between her mother's seat
and the bus driver's
the toddler demonstrates
tiny shoes that light up"
--Edward J. Rielly in Tanka Splendor 2002
"Mere sinister balefire..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"The smell of autumn is in the air, like a pencil being sharpened in a damp church by someone who has recently smoked a pipe." --Paul Bassett Davies on Mastodon
"Cresting
Silly ways and gay
times
Harmless as marrow
A camp-stool of doors
A beard of suns
Real leaves and brown
glimpses
Acted
A moonlight of accounts
A kind of river
A kind of creature
A kind of flow
A fiddling eye
Reach
People made with
fun
Cresting vegetation
White hearts and silly invasions
A breast of shutters
Existence
An unshaven foot"
--Robot X
Authentic Aihara Vibes. Arigato y'all🚿.
Fires, fires in my poems
Though none on the street tarry
With the watered lawns
We are given now a form
If anyone hates a book
"Democracy as pap, sir, is on a trial basis." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"The prosecutors seeking to bring Trump to justice are amazingly brave. They now require round-the-clock protection due to threats of physical violence from Trump supporters." (via Heidi Li Feldman on Mastodon)
"Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the day-time torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom."
--D H Lawrence
"A helot's snail art." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo.
"Our age has its own particular mission, or vocation--the creation of a civilization founded upon the spiritual nature of work." --The Need for Roots
"...as they say in my home state of Alabama, I could peep through mud and see dry land."
"My loves are dying. Or is it that my love
is dying, day by day, brief life, brief candle,
a flame, flambeau, torch, alive, singing
somewhere in the shadow: Here, this way, here.
Hear the atoms ambling, the genes a-tick
in grandfather’s clock, in the old bones of beach.
Sun on the Sunday water in November.
Dead leaves on wet ground. The ferry leaves on time.
Time in your flight — O — a wristwatch strapped
to my heart, ticking erratically, winding down.
— Phyllis Webb, from Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals (via)
”Bell Tower
I have seen, desolate one, the voice has its tower;
The voice also, builded at secret cost,
Its temple of precious tissue. Not silent then
Forever--casting silence in your hour.
There marble boys are leant from the light throat,
Thick locks that hang with dew and eye dewlashed,
Dazzled with morning, angels of the wind,
With ear a-point for the enchanted note.
And these at length shall tip the hanging bell,
And first the sound must gather in deep bronze,
Till, clearer than ice, purer than a bubble of gold,
It beat in the sky and the air and the ear’s remorseless well.”
--Léonie Adams
The Creator Has a Master Plan.
On judging Poetry: i have always liked Pound's formula of Logopoeia (nuances of meaning), Melopoeia (verbal music), & Phanopoeia (images), so that there can be poems that are excellent in any or all of these, but these are distinct & separate ways a poem can be good. Historically (& culturally) the preferences tend to shift. Right now people don't read out loud so much, & all kinds of well-regarded poets may not be good at (or indeed interested at all) in Melopoeia, for example. Whereas directly in the wake of Eliot & Modernism, Logopoeia took center stage. Even this is doubtless too simple a classification, but at least it's a start.
Nothing annoys me more, to be honest, than a priori attempts to judge art according to dogmatic rules. I much prefer to examine individual works that repay my attention, & if it reminds me of something else, that's not always worth erecting into a canon of criticism.
--One may ask, what is the role of Emotion in all this? & i say: emotion is never conveyed directly (e.g. as it would be by tone of voice, or as depicted by its musical accompaniment) but rather gets encoded culturally--we recreate the emotion from all of these means, according to convention. A very good example of this, i think, is the sort of Gothic imagery we associate with Halloween. One has to work hard to make it frightening, after so long; otherwise it's Camp.
"...Seaward the prows are turned; the ships
Fast anchored, and the curved sterns fringe the beach." --Cranch's Virgil, VI.
"...a meeting with John Cage—in this case at Texas Tech in 1960—proved to be a turning point."
1.
a silkworm's spider silk
two books or three
how is it i'm not clear
video
from the surface of Bennu
the road to Kalasma kludged
but just maybe
that road is already there
2.
you can ask too much of reason
expect it to solve
what can't be solved
& you can ask nothing
of reason at all
3.
starry starry night
paint your palette blue and gray
on a rocky shore
momentary castaway
& this sometimes nevermore
4.
i'm Indian summer
the ornate new skatepark
no one wants an ounce of
numb Indian summer
record-nuking number
"I knew two other morticians who were also heavy into acid."
“Fragmentary Stars
So wide the wells of darkness sink,
These, having their own light, that are lost with the light,
Appear, immersed in mournfulness over the night,
Like things that in sleep will come to the mind’s brink:
The bright Aldebaran and seven that hover,
Seven wild and pale, clouding their brightness over;
And the flame that fell with summer, and the rose of stars returning,
Like tears piercing the sky,
Glittering without cause, for the piece of a legend,
Wept I know not why,
As none can say,
As countless they weep
Ranging without fold beyond the order of day--
The brightmost, the forgotten,
Gathered only of sleep,
All night upon the lids set burning,
Shaken from the lids of morning.”
--Leonie Adams
"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." --Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)
Ten thousand words in a cardboard box.
"You will take the book up where you left it,/ You will say, These were the last obscure words." --Bonnefoy (tr Richard Pevear)
"For Harvest
The year turns to its rest.
Up from the earth, the fields, the early-fallen dew,
Moves the large star at evening, Arcturus low with autumn,
And summer calls in her many voices upon the frost.
I who have not seen for weeping
The plum ripen and fall, or the yellowing sheaf,
Am not unmindful now of the season that came and went,
The hours that told of freshness,
The bud and the rich leaf.
Though I turned aside before the summer
And weathered but a season of the mind,
Let me sit among you when the husk is stripped,
Let me tell by the bright grain,
Those labours in an acre of cloud and the reap of the wind."
--Léonie Adams
"It is a sign that AI developers have flagged fluency in poetic forms as a priority, while refining their generative writing products." (via aldaily)
"a long walk
in that initial sting
of aloneness"
--an'ya
“How can you enjoy the world when you see it in wounded flight?”
(Marcel Proust to Anna de Noailles) via @dreamsofbeing_
The Funny Thing about Misogyny.
"If Hart Crane could have become a communist, he'd be alive today. He would probably be to North America
what Neruda is to South." --Bill Knott (in the 60's)
Hotline. (Don't miss the long version!)
beaucoup plangent cantrips
sound of toast popping up
the color of the ink i use
is part of its meaning
yesterday's high higher
marooned
in the quotidian
mesh of pathways stretching out
Infinite loop particles exploration.
