( via / me )

There are Trains Which will not be Missed.

"The writer should be more than a clerk, or to turn a line by Frost the one who does our writing for us. I work sometimes in bookshops. Young people come in and their eyes light up when they see writers they've heard recommended -- Brautigan, Bukowski, the generation after Salinger, mostly, and Hesse. Here, it's as if they're saying, is at last an author who will understand me. Why they want to be understood, or feel understood, is a question they've not been raised to ask. (Keats loved to test things on his pulses, but probably didn't test his pulses on his pulses.) It's enough to put me off sentiment, or make me ashamed of my own gratitude, and that is a pity. But how American of them, to like things that are like themselves, because they are like themselves. Perhaps it's hard to think you're anything, and these writers solidify a shape. I wouldn't know. I don't read them. Maybe it helps to see your shabbier feelings compassionately expressed by a writer you've heard of." --Gerald Burns via

Composition 198.

"Its pure fingernails on high (Mallarmé)

Its pure fingernails on high devoted to their onyx
Anxiety, at midnight, supporting a torchbearer
Many a dream of evensong burned by the Phoenix
That does not collect a cinerary amphora

On the consoles in the vacant lounge, no folded shell
Abolished trinket of sound insignificance
(Because the Master went to draw tears from the Styx
With this the only object of which Nothingness is proud)

But near to the window on the empty north, a dying
Gold, according, perhaps, to the décor
Of unicorns kicking out of the fire against a nymph

She, dead, naked in the looking-glass still
That in forgetfulness enclosed by a frame
In sparkles soon after the septet make themselves seen"

--Jim Hanson 04/05/08 (via)

Can't Find My Way Home.