“The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.” –Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram (2003)
"If Greek or Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain."
"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass."
--Wallace Stevens
Jóga.
"Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.
Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead."
--Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen
"...I failed to realize that everything is mysterious, that we live only in mystery, that if chance existed, chance would be yet more mysterious than Providence." --J K Huysmans, 1903 preface to A Rebours, 1884
"...mosques...were built with mortar that had been mixed with musk. ...It is even said...that the Mosque of Zobiade still smells of musk today." --John Trueman, The Romantic Story of Scent (1975)
Five Images from the Life of Georg Trakl.
"XII.
Their spades grafted through the variably-resistant soil. They clove to the hoard. They ransacked epiphanies, vertebrae of the chimera, armour of wild bees' larvae. They struck the fire-dragon's faceted skin.
The men were paid to caulk water-pipes. They brewed and pissed amid splendour; their latrine seethed its estuary through nettles. They are scattered to your collations, mouldywarp.
It is autumn. Chestnut-boughs clash their inflamed leaves. The garden festers for attention: telluric cultures enriched with shards, corms, nodules, the sunk solids of gravity. I have accrued a golden and stinking blaze."
--Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (1971)
Fast moving clouds above a sea maybe.
army of rainy mornings
most of them lost · one last sings
a book i suppose i have · crimson bound
a small loud kibitzing
water collected in the streets flies up
& slops the hood in sheets
a paucity of cantrips
on the frontier of collapse
taps on an army morning
"The avant-garde has been effectively memory-holed, and if you try to point this out your contemporaries will point to various avant-garde-themed commercial products, which bear roughly the same relationship to the avant-garde as a 1959 Nancy comic riffing on abstract expressionism bears to the butt of its riff (I myself love Ernie Bushmiller, by the way), and will insist that these phantom apparitions are proof that the tradition in question is still alive and well." --Justion Smith-Ruiu on his substack
Off the cuff Shakespeare sonnet.
"...As though by some great shock
The earth should to its very centre yawn,
And all the infernal world and pallid realms
Hateful to gods disclosed, and from above
The drear abyss unbared, within whose deeps
The trembling ghosts shrink from the light let in..."
--Cranch's Virgil, VIII.
Coward. I will just say that there are very few bands that go to the absolute heart of darkness like this one does.
"No omen of Orion,
mid a dim noir
of one Moon."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"X
Pristine and ultimate stone of groundless
adventure has just died
soul and all, October lodging with child.
From three months of absence, ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitred monodactyl, dies laughing.
How behind they oust pairs
of opposites. How number peeks
from under every avatar.
How whales plunge to doves.
How the latter cleave their beaks
cubiquitous to the third wing.
How we saddle up, before monotonous haunches.
We tow ten months toward ten,
toward one more beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three of absence.
And gestation's nine.
There is not the slightest violence.
The patient sits up
and seated preens tranquil pomades."
--Magda Bogin's Trilce
"The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?" --Dorothy Parker
"I held up that costermonger dummy significantly." --@harryskeeler
"O Little Root of a Dream
O little root of a dream
you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.
Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,
even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter."
--Paul Celan (tr Popov/McHugh) via @johannesgoranss
Here is the video that I had as the backing to my talk.
"who among us
will not survive today?
a caterpillar
stretches across the abyss
between my fingers"
--Collin Barber in Tanka Splendor 2008
"But I do not quarrel with fate. It is not a contest in which we should emerge victorious." --@icomptonburnett
Ark Encounter. (via @greatdismal)
"Since entering middle age 40 years ago I’ve referred to my bathroom as 'the situation room'." --@shteyngart
shredding event cancelled
smell of grass that's just cut
the sky glowers glumly
soul music for my journey
overlay of echoes
from old stories carried
Fillmore, clown debacle
shredding event cancelled
pencil on good paper
a faint scrape i scramble
to set down what's whispered
in the purblind blazing
dull pencil & deathless
quand'ry that i quench at
Nanobot swarms optimizing the Universe for alignment.
"I admire tinsel as much as gold: indeed, the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because it is sadder." --letters of Flaubert
Interesting simple modulation of contrasts.
"...they could see the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die." --G K Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross (1909)
"NOR IS IT WRITTEN
Nor is it written that you may not grieve.
There is no rule of joy; long may you dwell
Not smiling yet in that last pain,
On that last supper of the heart.
It is not written that you must take joy
Because not thus again shall you sit down
To ply the mingled banquet
Which the deep larder of illusion shed
Like myth in time grown not astonishing.
Lean to the cloth awhile, and yet awhile,
And even may your eyes caress
Proudly the used abundance.
It is not written in what heart
You may not pass from magic plenty
Into the straitened nowadays.
To each is given secrecy of heart,
To make himself what heart he please
In stirring up from that fond table
To sit him down at this sharp meal.
It shall not here be asked of him
‘What thinks your heart?’
Long may you sorely to yourself upbraid
This truth unwild, this only-bread.
It is not counted what large passions
Your heart in ancient private keeps alive.
To each is given what defeat he will.
--Laura (Riding) Jackson
In the Court of the Crimson King.
the sky full of arrayed flying HAFTS
halcyon · with a purely notional AZURE
rounds of tsantsa golf
call it FUGUE
whatever seems to happen
those fiery fountains of noise will TRUMP
from the real future
Graywyvern with his crimson messenger SEEPS
"An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends." --GK Chesterton
"we know all too well that however profound these temporary respites may be, anxiety will still prevail" --@Daily_Proust
to love a bomb
who does not love a bomb?
we've made so many
to love a bomb
is to have causes
& reasons
the broken world complains
to love a bomb
when all else fails you
Rune of the Finland woman. (via @maryanncorbett)
"An American writer does not see the United States in danger of disappearing."
"blowing by
a pencil-thin daymoon
misty fog
but in this steady wind
my love is at anchor"
--an'ya
"The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern." --@hbloomquotes
The mysterious photograph of a chess game that never happened.
"...Only, for the nights that were,
Soldier, and the dawns that came,
When in sleep you turn to her,
Call her by my name."
--Dorothy Parker
"my site is wherever
a rose grows,
wherever clouds cast their shadows
on roofless houses,
wherever a bomb does not fall,
wherever a child does not confuse
a cloud for bomb smoke."
--@MosabAbuToha
prior to names
& all the mistakes of naming
downpour in the night
dream house destroyed
can still use the radio
Notes from the Edge Conference.
"O great dishonorable beast, War,
Cockroach and millionaire,
Snake-eyed cousin of pestilence
Why do we dance for you,
Why do we dance to exhaustion?"
--Thomas Merton
"And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that's when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it's in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat." --Hélène Cixous
"1381.
I suppose the time will come
Aid it in the coming
When the Bird will crowd the Tree
And the Bee be booming
I suppose the time will come
Hinder it a little
When the Corn in Silk will dress
And in Chintz the Apple
I believe the Day will be
When the Jay will giggle
At his new white House the Earth
That, too, halt a little--"
--Emily Dickinson
On the innocence of the kibitzers.
something in my grasp
that i could understand
purblind ever grope
something in my grasp
between the wine & the grape
enigma prisms stained...
something in my grasp.
that i could understand.
"Word of the Day: MACE-GLOAK (n.) someone funds an extravagant lifestyle by borrowing money they never intend to pay back [18thC slang]" --@HaggardHawks
Music for drottkvaett: Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You For Lettin' Me (Be Myself Again)"; the Beatles's "Come Together".
Sunlight through stained glass, 4pm.
"At Melville's Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."
--Hart Crane
"NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen . . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall."
--Adelaide Crapsey
"GOP learns the hard way: Turning the base up too high blows out your Speaker" --@leedrutman
"An imaginary planet has a role like a clown in Shakespeare." --Vonnegut
Though these intelligent predators no longer took an active part in killing their food, they still relaxed by watching nonstop depictions of slaughter & violence; they could not imagine a story without violent conflict; & their only concept of peace was a quiet battlefield where one side has annihilated another.
The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs.
"Her Wordhoard
She calls me Feorsið, Far-Travelling.
(I’m trying to work out if it’s ironic.)
I’m the Queen’s Mind. I objected
to Handmaiden; after all, it’s not
my hands that are at her service.
When the king’s poet was poached
by a neighbouring tribe – the lawless
thieving bastards! – at first the men
wouldn’t entertain me. We get enough
nagging at home! But when I unlocked
my wordhoard, trotted out the old
familiar tales, they settled back in their
seats. Give them lopped-off body parts
and they soon feel at home. What’s a
legend without beheadings, I always say.
And they began to listen when I sang
of sea-voyages and mere-maidens,
of queens made of gold and dragons
who ruled the roost, of lands where
warrior women wielded spears not
spindles... Outlandish, they scoffed,
but still they sat as my new words
filled their ears like sea water in a shell –
dreich, eldritch, fettlin’ and flaggin’,
barmcake, boggart, buggered – pipe down,
you daft ha’porth. This is women’s
talk and we won’t be silenced now.
Time unfolds before me like a
telescope to the stars and for a
second I can see you – yes, you, here,
in this poem... Cross-legged at the
Queen’s feet, her niece hangs
on my every word. Greedy,
she seizes my battle-bright swords,
armours herself in my shield-wall of
daring. I call her Ellen, meaning
courage. And when we return on the
tide, trailing stories like seaweed,
palming a pearl or two, I know that
together we’ve travelled far."
--Laura Varnam in Bad Lilies (via @amjuster)
Green Shirt. Cover by former Herman's Hermit.
" 'You all know the reason for the superciliousnesss of the camel?'
'No,' said [Peter] Brook.
'You see, the Koran has ninety-nine names for God, but only the camel knows the hundredth.'
'Hence his superciliousness,' said Brook.
'Exactly,' said the Leader."
--John Heilpern, The Conference of the Birds (1977)
"In the Quran, there is no chapter, or Sura, titled al-‘Aaed—a word that means the returnee..." (via @joyellemcs)
"The arts they sought are but injurious." --Mooney's Hosidius Geta
Museum poem in alliterative meter.
"Three Visitors
Mist on moonspill as midnight nears.
Adrift but not dreaming our drowsy son
is covered and kissed. At the kitchen door
our old basset is barking; coyotes out back
are standing like statues down by the dogwoods.
Across the crystal of crusted snow,
they search for stragglers to startle and chase.
Their vigil reveals no victims this night.
Trash would be trouble; they trot away
unbothered by bloodthroated growling and baying.
No star distracts their stealthy march.
As the highway hums they howl through the calm,
then savor new scents that spice their path
in this world awash in wonder and wrath."
--A. M. Juster
moved mountain of needles
a new road pursuing
the stilb-lined labyrinth
lurk algid nostalgias
but revoke ghost vistas
"And thou thyself with sacred fillet bind
Thy brows, set fire to sacred branches rich
And dusky pitch."
--Mooney's Hosidius Geta
"I can’t remember why, but we had previously been in some kind of argument about the word caduceus..."
