( 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.

( via / via )

"...The 27th stanza is an example of what has been called "the most complex and exquisite type of palindrome ever invented'..."

"the pyramid of the magician"

a cardboard box · full of sand
a stadium stocked with · steel balloons
morth muttered · in deep midnight
bright plains stretching · for one who plans to cross

"Congratulations to Mike Maguire (@MikeSpeaks) for winning the Grand Prize and Poetry categories in the 2024 SymmyS palindrome awards."

" 'anti-semitic' is the new 'woke,' the new 'crt,' the new 'cultural marxism.' in the right-wing lexicon, all words are empty signifiers and therefore fungible." --@upstaterica

Tomorrow.

( via / via )

Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews.

"It is true that after his death Thomson's Corolianus was spliced with Shakespeare's to become the version favored on the British stage for many years..." --Percy Adams, introduction to: The Plays of James Thomson (1979)

"Pipeline" on Lawrence Welk.

"my pronouns"

morphs the landscape scaffold
flickersome past flaunting
Funes skinflint

bards i knew are buried
their chapbooks char in the grate
beautifully chastened

& what remains whelming
by mere persistence sings
wheelless & sideways

hulks at the cruel curb

Madman Across the Water.

( via )

Hornet's Nest.

"A Gull Goes Up

Gulls when they fly move in a liquid arc,
Still head, and wings that bend above the breast,
Covering its glitter with a cloak of dark,
Gulls fly. So as at last toward balm and rest,
Remembering wings, the desperate leave their earth,
Bear from their earth what there was ruinous-crossed,
Peace from distress, and love from nothing-worth,
Fast at the heart, its jewels of dear cost.
Gulls go up hushed to that entrancing flight,
With never a feather of all the body stirred.
So in an air less rare than longing might
The dream of flying lift a marble bird.
Desire it is that flies; then wings are freight
That only bear the feathered heart no weight."

--Léonie Adams

Forty Miles of Bad Road.

"Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)"

- Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (via @EverySongIverEve)

Ghost Riders in the Sky.

( via / hotel point op cit )

Black & white subtle busyness.

"The invocation of 'legality,' when what is being protested is a violation of the law of multiple orders of magnitude of more seriousness, is the exact sort of pettiness you'd expect from the morally bankrupt." --@_ryanruby_

"A writer continually struggles for clarity against the language he’s using or, more accurately, against the common usage of that language. He doesn’t see language with the readability and clarity of something printed out. He sees it, rather, as a terrain full of illegibilities, hidden paths, impasses, surprises, and obscurities. Its map is not a dictionary but the whole of literature and perhaps everything ever said."

"Death of a Palindromist (palindrome)

Now ill as mirror,
reset a torso golden.

Words sap, mock,
cut me open.

Old as a tide,
I edit a sad, lone poem,
tuck compass.

Drowned logos rotates.
Error rims all I won."

--@SpoonerRhythms

They've made a fur suit for those robot dogs.

( via / me )

If i ever walk onto a flat green plain with just 20 houses that look Exactly The Same i Will have a panic attack.

"Poliespo for Dummies"

spraintsquander · skyblue years
i learn belatedly · like us all

leafblower blither · blending with fresh sun
my damp sneakers · with difficulty climb

Self-knitting isometric gif.

"Genius is all haunt’d eyes and bad haircuts: see Wittgenstein, see Beckett, see Marguerite Young. You don’t think the dapperly-coiff’d Thomas Wolfe’s a genius, do ya stupor man? John Ashbery (whose haircuts’ve gone slightly better of late) wrote, back in the god-awful hair days: 'We have seen the city; it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.' " --John Latta at Hotel Point blog 4-27-05

Two clowns taking turns thwacking each other on the head with a 2x4, detailed oil painting, james ensor, remedios varo.

( via / via )

Tricky stairs.

"A funny thing is that I tend to give all my novels the same title to begin with—Wrestling with God. Then while I’m writing, I realise, Oh, that’s not quite it . . ."

--Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2022) via @timesflow

Polka A Go-Go With Li'l Wally.

"ledger"

   faint sidewalk ripples
dull gray sky unbrightening
   an insistent trill

Remington's nocturnes at the
Amon Carter museum

Shape Study 43.

( via / via )

Faun's Midafternoon.

"sushi bistro"

triskaidektrance · trickle-whisper
in the dainty dark · carry on calmly
how the world works · one of those stymied of
to its sheer show · more surely attentive
& the rain runs · all around us heedless
past & present · prattle on equally
island of amber · otchkies for the main chance
filter out fathoms · of velvet fingers
in the no-longer night · announcing resumption
in plainer terms · of the putrid deal

Kyoto International Conference Centre.

"We’re all just saying this same thing to ourselves, people of conscience that I know. None of it is new or even surprising. But god, the way empire seeps into you, the way you see it in the new buds of trees and then the sun, shining off a riot sheet or SWAT helmet." --@saintsoftness

YAOSF.255.

( via / via )

░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░ ░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░ ░R░░a░░b░░b░░i░░t░.

"I am watching a toddler die on a table in a field hospital in Rafah with half her face blown apart while listening to college students fight tears reporting on a police assault on their campus for protesting that, and I feel like I am losing my fucking mind." --@marisapk (via @dreamsofbeing_)

"If neither Kristi Noem nor Greg Gianforte have the patience, responsibility or moral compass when it comes to basic decency to animals, they lack the fundamental decency needed to govern a state."

"jigsaw puzzle
our fingers linger
on the same blue sky"

--Cherese Cobb via @frogpondjournal

And I survived a couple of assassination attempts as well over this.

( via / via )

Beacon from Mars.

"Venus does not rotate, but keeps the same face always toward the Sun, just as the Moon does toward the earth. One face is forever daylight, and the other forever night, and only along the twilight zone, a strip five hundred miles wide, is human habitation possible, a thin ring of territory circling the planet.

Toward the sunlit side it verges into the blasting heat of a desert where only a few Venusian creatures live, and on the night edge the strip ends abruptly in the colossal ice barrier produced by the condensation of the upper winds that sweep endlessly from the rising air of the hot hemisphere to cool and sink and rush back again from the cold one.

The chilling of warm air always produces rain, and at the edge of the darkness the rain freezes to form these great ramparts. What lies beyond, what fantastic forms of life may live in the starless darkness of the frozen face, or whether that region is as dead as the airless Moon—those are mysteries.

But the slow libration, a ponderous wobbling of the planet from side to side, does produce the effect of seasons. On the lands of the twilight zone, first in one hemisphere and then the other, the cloud-hidden Sun seems to rise gradually for fifteen days, then sink for the same period. It never ascends far, and only near the ice barrier does it seem to touch the horizon; for the libration is only seven degrees, but it is sufficient to produce noticeable fifteen-day seasons." --Stanley Weinbaum, "Parasite Planet", Astounding Stories, 1935 via

Pop.

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say." --Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)

A Planetary System Around a Binary Star, Including a Mini-Neptune in the Habitable Zone.

( via / via )

Kristen Wiig as Ann-Marget on SNL.

"one of those days when the voice cannot utter and the hand cannot write nevertheless there are words everywhere and all you can do is lay your silence amidst them?" --@dreamsofbeing_

"Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, or William Carlos Williams—all spoke other languages as children, as did Jack Kerouac..."

"depauperate seiche"

we climb the ugly road to the ambuscade
to find out of what stuff this country is made

Buzz Saw.

( via / via )

"This means that there is a renunciation of the common life based on culture, which is subject to standards, and a return to the common life of barbarism."

"the burning of a minor library"

tiring treefrog chorus
tugs at my blink shrinking
floor-spread sweater flatiron
flunking i yet function

brick district by breast stroke
brandish protest notecards
demand mist divestment
or make your black acre

I Saw the Light Decay.

I crave bookcases & a place to put them.

Window.

( via / via )

Earlier version of the above.

"To speak of the future is to use a language that is forever ahead of itself, consigning things that have not yet happened to the past, to an 'already' that is forever behind itself, and in this space between utterance and act, word after word, a chasm begins to open, and for one to contemplate such emptiness for any length of time is to grow dizzy, to feel oneself falling into the abyss." --Paul Auster , writing on Royston's Lycophron in: "The Invention of Solitude," Collected Prose (pp 107-110)

How Line Breaks.

"private lake"

Pax "Exodus" Piaf
appears smack at year's end
skull askew on Fillmore
skillfully fadged magic

& Surt who escorted
by cinders naught taught me
in the ill eye's wellspring
no answer save vise icing

The Meaning of Locality.

( via / via )

Under the bridge 2.

"Lollard's share"

grayblue corridor growing
thrusts away wispiness
grip this word

this drive through dreary suburbs
this coverage of cataclysmic
droog contention

is there a picture paired
to my formal cark-flurry
pass me flying

pass the Lady of the Lake
as she waits her shipwreck,
a Lollard his share

"All with the intention to sort of mentor a bespoke poetic alter ego."

"The eyes are mine shafts, and dripping they lead down to the mind
whose diamonds tip our heaven-drills."

--Amit Majmudar

The Dallas Cricket Apocalypse.

( via / via )

"Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate..."

"SHAKESPEARE (Palindrome)

Burst elm.
A hymnist.

Call a Romeo play
or a royal poem —

or all acts
in my Hamlet's rub."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"'AI' will not replace you."

"Voluspá"

silver
balmy morning
after the storms have flown
Walpurgisnacht · pins the nightmare
with song

"New Goose returns again and again to homes: to owning or losing houses, to living in inadequate dwellings, and to shelters that shield people from violence and the violence that secures such shelters." (via Metafilter)

( via / via )

Under.

"The survivors

We settled here, scarcely believing our fortune
no more to scull the seas. The island was safe but
there were many deaths: driven by the darkness
men killed their kin; others drowned in shallow water

before they could reach the sea. The island was safe but
there was no earth to cultivate, nowhere to bury those men
killed by their kin. Bodies float in shallow water.
Corpses were left to rot, covered in rocks to hinder beasts:

there was no earth to hold them. Where could we hide the dead
when our sons were buried alive on the barren rock?
They were left to die, smothered in stones to keep them still;
the winter was their warder. Snow blew over the bones

of the firstborn buried alive on the highest rock.
The ice on those cairns was as good as a key in a lock:
the winter, their warder. Wind blew between the stones
and if sometimes it sounded like a child crying to be free

the ice on each cairn was as good as a key in a lock.
And so we settled, scarcely believing our fortune,
although it might sound as if we were crying to be free,
crying for a death to deliver us from darkness."

--Nancy Campbell

[Pixel Viens] .

"You do not see her yet. For the moment, you see only her traces." --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Milton's Eve. (via @kukukadoo)

( via / via )

Pandemic Ghazal.

"Andromeda is penning dark grimoires" --@Anthony_Etherin

Cossak Walk.

"gryllisfoetor"

comets portents cartels
killing clowns in Fillmore
painted cow skulls pointing
at the Pink Moon's cincture
& Raven flaps flivver
wings in a whelk welkin
harrowing hewn onus
hatches brinks in Matchtown

Depression.

( via / via )

"If we struggle to understand the direction we are headed in, if we take our task so seriously as to render it inert, we miss the very thing we are attempting to analyse."

"Yule Log Drottkvaett (June 2009)

Heaving horses strive to
Hearth's home, trotting path through
Forest fog and boar-land:
Furnace burns their burden;
Pretty purge shall gorge on
People's crimes as grime of
Yesteryear is lost and
Youngling tongues a-banter."

--Daniel Stride/ “Mielikko Karvulakki” (via)

Words of Thanks for Thor of Scrolls.

"The greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish." --Lyn Hejinian

Gargoyle poems. (At least one alliterative & one drottkvaett.)

( me / via )

Boots of Spanish Leather.

"Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world."

--Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby (via @timesflow)

"In short, I was captivated, and when Lew closed his email by mentioning that no-one had ever, to his knowledge, actually used the stanza in English before, the deal was sealed."

"MURDER OF CROWS (Triolet)

A murder, from a garden, rose
and left us in the dying light.
The sky is red now — no one knows
a murder from a garden rose.
It’s rare to see so many crows,
and now they’ve gone to gather night.
A murder from a garden rose
and left us in the dying light."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"To me, this lightbearing move, in which total refusal becomes paradoxically foundational, is Notley’s signature gesture, what she herself characterizes as Disobedience."

( via / via )

Desert Rose.

"Windsor Moon"

scrannel throng the scrimmage
ascribed to bad vibedom
mobled rearview mirror
      cobwebs bedewed
      in the gray-candied
morninglight adornment

yellowbus gold yielding
yonder where i pawned it
tombstone eyes find teaser
      at the fremd portal
      one magnolia petal
tilts the whole frost goalpost

The Muse of Impossibility.

"Satoyama (里山), a Japanese term applied to the border zone or area between mountain foothills and arable flat land" --@fedeitaliano

A Rose Shoulders Up.

( me / via )

Casa del Portuale.

Let's just have AI replace the administrators who are so clearly incapable of understanding education, instead of the teachers who do.

A rainy night.

      "Gilead Goliad"

1.
   wait at the wish theshold
   worn redbrick no setback
   i caught a darb curbside
   coign to peruse losing
   more myth than mile-solid
   among sep'rate hungers
to story the stolen · stepchild fixture
   that holds what cannot be held

2.
double dealt · by the dying embers
Glockenspiel glowworm · come agley
a clear call · for a cold eye
genius Jestocaust · at the Giuoco Piano

3.
Fillmore portal polecat
with a pure heart's fury
coruscating whitewash
does a cartwheel farting

"The strange ending, with the gem-cutter, disoriented after months in a dark prison, wandering through a Jewish quarter destroyed not by a pogrom but by modern urban renewal, ironically invokes the golem without even mentioning it."

( via via @smithsonianmag@flipboard.com / via )

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Sci-Fi Movie Tier List. (thx Melanie!)

"SAVE THE CANDOR

Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban

girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its

waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and

fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American

candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-

tenor--only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,

humbly numbered
(as their days are)
for us crazy
crown- and throat- and

belly-gazers.
any niche as
fragile as a
candor's renders

its extinction
certain. We can
sabotage its
habitat with

half a laugh or
quarter murmur,
fluster coveys'
worth of candors

off their branches,
which, abandoned,
soon are little
more than snarking-

grounds for minor
birds, the common
snipe, the yellow-
bellied bittern."

--Amit Majmudar

"Her still lifes, gardens, and wunderkammers exist in a twilight zone where invasive species and extinct creatures frolic, and vibrant flora spills into dreamlike vistas of aggressively suffocating vines and jellyfish-flocked undersea ruins." (via feuilleton)

"Herrera y Reissig, like Lugones, saw his age as a crepuscular moment, as a transition period full of confusing signs, extravagant artifice, and distortion." --The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo

The Magical Calendar of Tycho Brahe.

( via / via )

No one wants to be a clown anymore 💥.

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

~The Left Hand of Darkness via @hainishcycle@botsinspace

"As if a change of gender was a change of genre. This is why I don’t trust memoir. As a genre its appeal seems to be that for the reader it renders some other life into an intelligible narrative shape, so that the reader can imagine their own life might have a shape too."

"I wouldn’t be afraid of a swing away from fantasy in the culture at large. I’d rather work in tension with the real anyway. If a deep paradigm shift like that caught on and became the working assumption of the next couple of generations, yes, imaginative space might shrink and it might become important to defend “the practice of the fantastic” (if there ever was such a thing). But until then any crusade based on the assumption that organised fantastika is an abuse victim is absurd at best, at worst the bad faith of an industry astroturf, derived from attitudes that were last applicable (if they ever were applicable) in the 1960s & 70s. It wouldn’t be–it isn’t–much more than commercial protectionism. The door of that wardrobe’s been banging in the wind for fifty or sixty years. Let’s not do squeals of horror and tantrums of entitlement if it swings shut. Whoever wanted a perfectly receptive climate for what they write?" --@mjohnharrison on mastodon

Room OFF time ⬛ ⬜ ⬛ ⬜ 🔵 ⬛ ⬜ ⬛ ⬜ 🔵.

( via / via )

Canada Geese family heading home 🥰.

"RUNE POEM

      Fe
Wealth is a wolf, in the hedge found.
She eyes you, blinking gold coins.

      Ur
The aurochs, Thor's ur-ox,
Rushes the hunter in his camo vest.

      Thur
The workweek is a ladder of thorns
We acend to the rose of a weekend.

      Os
The ash tree blossomed these runes.
Awestruck, we are most us.

      Rad
Riding is sacred, asphault a psalm.
Hells Angels read the road.

      Kaun
Contagion, bedbound, keeps count
As fever's red creeps up five.

      Hagall
Hail falls on the desert, a cold seed.
White wheat halos all the hills.

      Nyd
Need knits his brows over his bills.
How does a gave-not have three jobs?

      Isa
Ice is deceiving, glass on the lake.
It chokes children without a trace.

      Ar
Earth is an heiress rumored rich,
Left a legacy of acrid air.

      Sol
The sun, unsullied, smiles dully
At the soiled creek, the spilling oil.

      Tyr
Tired of war, we wear our tears.
Interior amulets.

      Bjarkan
We bark at the sky as hard as we can,
But the gods remain swingers of birches.

      Maor
The more he wants no more than he has,
The more he becomes more than he is.

      Logr
Bottoms up in the name of the father,
Water of life or bitter lager.

      Yr
A new yew erupts from Ur's sewers.
Time eats its young and rewrites the ruins."

--Amit Majmudar, Dothead (2016)

Plague-doctor who is also a capybara, inside a ruined Walgreens, in the rain, detailed pencil drawing, Dürer.

"But we will meet again, when Night
Throws her black pall athwart the corpse-like heavens,
And typifies the shadows and the glooms
That fold about the heart and soul of those
Who, in these times of ours, with daring wing
Dive down into the deeps of human life,
And come back reeking with dark doubts and dreads..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

Gray Square.

( irene allender on fb / via )

Apparition on the bars.

"unfortunately american universities are weirdly actually just private equity firms, landlords, and war profiteers that just kind of randomly offer classes for up to 70k a year" --@ftmensch via @danez_smif

i do think about this picture all the time.

"Because the Just have been thrown down
Because Crime snatched sceptre and crown
Because all rights have been betrayed
Because the fiercest now make moan
Because on every boundary stone
My land’s dishonour is displayed;

Republic of our fathers’ right,
Pantheon filled with noble light,
Gold dome in the free blue sky
Temple of immortal shadows
Because these men ascended ladders
To paste-up Empire on your side

Because the soul is fallible,
Because we grovel, can’t recall
Truth, Cleanness, Grandeur, Beauty’s bloom,
The indignant eyes of History,
Law, Honour, Righteousness, Glory,
And all of those now in the tomb;

I love exile! Sorrow, je t’aime!
Sadness, be my diadem!
I love you, haughty poverty!
I love this door the wind blows through.
I love Bereavement’s grave statue
Who’s come here to sit next to me.

I love that Evil works me over;
Because in shadow I recover
Things that make my spirit smile:
Dignity, Faith, Truth, though flown
You, proud Freedom, exiled-one,
And you, Devotion, though reviled.

I love this solitary island
Jersey, that freedom-loving England
Covers with her ancient flag,
Dark waters that by moments grow
The ship at sea, a wandering plough
Whose ocean-furrows turn and drag.

O deep-set sea, I love your gulls!
They shake your waves in glittering pearls
With their wide wild-coloured wings!
They plunge into the giant breakers
Shoot out from the curling gapers
As a soul flees sufferings.

I love this rock’s solemnity
Where I can hear eternity,
It's unrelenting, as remorse is;
Born again where shadows span,
Waves break on the sombre land,
Mothers on their children’s corpses."

--Victor Hugo via

"Always fun to remember that when Hawthorne writes about how his office job totally killed his creativity and will to live he was talking about a 3.5 hour work day."

( via / via )

Simple mechanism.

"on a rainy morning"

sinister soap op'ra
unspooling · thick gruelthwart
orange jumpsuit imping
only in dreams bonus

"A rain of tears..."

“I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, Some of Us Have Not Died. Some of us did NOT die…And what shall we do, we who did not die?”

— June Jordan’s keynote lecture at Barnard College. November 9, 2001. (via @blkwomenradical via @Danez_Smif)

"When we have gone the stone will stop singing."