( via / via )

'Two Cats' (Sam and Arry).

A poet who writes like his speaking is like a chess player who only plays against a home computer.

"Nothing disappears..."

( via / via )

Kikajon.

   "Poems

Poems are born when life is dead,
Or else so much alive
No ribs can give it residence,
No heart can give it hive.

There is no soul of transient thew,
No mind of common grey
That can subsist on such an air—
But poems come that way."

—Lindley Williams Hubbell, Dark Pavilion (1927)

"A thousand years ago, there was something at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers that looked exactly like the United States of America, and behaved exactly like the United States of America too."

The conventional Anglicization "Odyssey" has always bugged me. I know it's meant to evoke the Greek, but for this to spell the way it's usually pronounced breaks about four spelling rules. It ought to be spelled "Oddicy".

The Barnard’s Star planetary system: stability, composition, and evolution of four sub-Earth exoplanet. (via)

( via / via )

"A local mariachi band greeted us with a song they wrote for our campaign!"

“Along the pavement roll’d the muttering head.” –Pope’s Odyssey, XXII

Launch.

      "palantyrrany"

quotidian refusal
bruises from, ascian
      sky fiery
   neighbor swathcrib
where is it burning · whittled-down query

crowdmasked, no liquescent
lunar runescar following
      hallmark of
   smol haruspice
bard's pert · quotidian refusal

"While Vienna’s coffeehouses bred modernism, in Belgrade’s kafanas grew conspiracy and rage."

( via / via )

American Occupation.

"improving your site experience"

bonetrail crunch to a monster lair
on TV ranting
heroes scant & scared-y
depredations-skeptic
if he were here right now
i'd know what to do—
i don't even know

how to finish this poem

Only on Substack.

"We are really going to torch the only habitable planet maybe in the entire universe because someone needed to commit sex crimes and make a machine that lets you put tits on Garfield."
—Sarah Lyons via

Audio Visualscapes.

( via / via )

"Philosophy returns whenever the old answers stop working."

"Not since Sordello, Browning’s famously obscure and incomprehensible epic poem, had the echt Browning obscurity manifested itself so gloriously." —Adam Roberts via

"The Navajo, I have heard, bring a medicine to their people with painting done with sand. Part of the healing is scattering the art to the wind afterwards. “Forsaking the proximity” of theology in order to find shelter in a religion as art I wonder if we might imagine together what such a sand painting with our own particles and pigments might sound like on our tongue."

      "the black cake icing"

dregs tarrying · vague drottkvaett
   tiltdecantative noondim
awhile yet off now · wharf mistlost
   repurposed paper towels
   in the antelucan midrash
two jewels suspend · against spider velvet

"Once we accept that being offline is off the table for most, this is where 'analog' quietly steps in as a substitute, the dupe we can actually afford. And just like all dupes, it is only the appearance of the real thing, stripped of its substance."

( via / via )

Dry Dwellers of Eternity.

"either a detective or a victim"

one for whom things are certain
sans sleep on the boardwalk
morbid dialogs
by acidulous moonlight

drizzilicious droshky
windows an expense too far
sleepwalker a thousand years
arise with the morning

< One Hundred Visions of War.

“I’ve been married to a Communist and a Fascist, and neither one of them ever took out the garbage.” —Lee Grant to Gloria Steinem/1975 via @grissom

"The Weil is in that handful of books/essays where I remember exactly where I was standing when I first picked it up. Can't remember for sure which library it was though weirdly I think it might actually have been in the Fisher House (Catholic Chaplaincy) library in Cambridge, bit random. I do have a physical memory of my orientation in relation to the shelf etc. Something I only have for the books that have made the greatest impression."

( via / via )

The Wrong Sky.

"No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be.

'The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money.' " —@reasie.bsky.social

There's a whole grisly genre of taxidermy children's books. The first one i ever saw was kittens. That thing still haunts me.

cancer fingerling
filling a schooner from the side
becrimson'd sky & decrees
decay drags its heels for

"I never met my real Grandmother on my Dad’s side. She was an artist. I finally got one of her paintings."

( via nightcafe / via )

"The film is set in a Tokyo preparing for the 2020 Olympics..."

"The Railway Junction

From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.

How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there’s none,
Nor traveller to be seen –

Where late there was a throng. And now,
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.

But not their way; the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,

That fair one, too, discreetly veiled –
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
Or shores, ere night is spent.

I nothing know why thus we met –
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except –
The evening growing late –

That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas."

—Walter de la Mare via @nigeness via @amjuster

Who Killed Cock Robin.

"Back in my Moscow days, anti-cafes (антикафе) were all the rage. You were charged for the time you spent at the cafe, not for individual drinks and snacks. They also had board games, video games, instruments, and books. My favorite, Tsiferblat (clock face), had a cool, improvised, slightly bohemian atmosphere, a bit like a Budapest ruin bar." —@pjkinville

Birth.

https://www.tumblr.com/endlessmazin/822025412882432000/the-great-rupture-in-ripplescape-realm

( via / me )

Save Dallas City Hall.

"I shaped my entire life around never needing a car." —Rhyd Wildermuth via

On Highway 11.

"how swarming party"

1.
staunch inchmeal stagger
      in the storm
   any armor
starkest aside hiding
coffeegrowl · grief is a country

landmarks, the lined pantry
      with the goods
   forgetful adds
allocates in winter
westering gravelpath · expert swallow

staunch inchmeal stagger

2.
Cyclopean sampler
clatteringly clueless
      candy pills
   brisk marzipan
the road direct · but ruthless

into broken antlers
ignominious figments
      candy hues
   on the armed guards

3.
cassowary
   dictionary
storage unit
   mundane ferry
cardboard boxes
   sordid praxis
books in limbo
   thinned-out excess
thoughts in harness
   outside furnace
forest in sparks-rain
   the blame onus
stalled routine is
   swaddled Venus
cassowary
   concertinas
mundane ferry

4.
lit "fifty one"
on black lacquer
snatched away

ears still ringing

Gebir.

( via / via )

Hellbound train.

   blindfold into
      blasting grounds
penguin suicide · sanguine three degrees
   clouds clustering darkly
   clyte not, elsewhere hurrying

   blindfold into
      blasting grounds
our games rattled · in scattered rooms
   storying it sternly
   our star-nosed hearts bartering

Solar Eclipse Over Snowy Central Park NYC, 1925.

"The image on the cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" is from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. " via

A small literary press is exactly this.

( via / via )

Take my Number.

"We must imagine Sisyphus. That is the problem." —Alexander Fayne via

Lego Klimt.

   all the rats
waiting for their turn
   to jump ship

their pockets bulging
their consciences clear

"The environment shaped more than conduct: it decided which beliefs could be spoken, and the beliefs it permitted were the ones that matched how the place already ran.."

( me / via )

Snow-flakes.

"insect carving for dummies"

permanent daylight savings
since nothing's left to save
these underfoot pieces
permanent daylight savings

dare not criticize
hijinks repercussive
permanent daylight savings
—since nothing's left to save

The Hazel Copse.

Typewriters also have their drawbacks. For years i used a vintage one, & when the mouldering old office supply store that was the only place in town that stocked that kind of ribbon closed, i thought i would die.

Overuse.

( via / via )

Empyrean Series.

The one time i was a judge at a poetry slam, i got booed because i only gave 1’s & 2’s (on a scale of 5). Like, poetry isn’t a sliding scale.

Attis in Caledon.

"The Night is Chilly but not Dark

On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky
And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey,
A voice still whispers in me, far away –
A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly
There rises from the dead that shadowy hell,
The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand,
The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land,
A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle.
Then fades the phantom, and once more I know
Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now,
Our battlefields reconquered by the plough,
And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago."

—F L Lucas via

"The scene is not a static allegory but a captured catastrophe."

( oil painting by me / via )

Hospice.

"macarthur spork"

margent pupeo purge
matutinal coolth trolling
pat tsk-tsk
crossing Apollo croonwisp

where this rumble Rorschachs
crazy rain
or drouth till the droogs crisp
zymurgy of zero-sum

drogulus xystering

Oversharecropper.

"Amazing detail I just learned from a discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ student diaries: he once gave up looking at the sky for Lent" —@someflowerssoon

A Joan Mitchell painting was estimated to sell at aution for nearly five times the price of a Jackson Pollock painting.

( via / via )

"I live only on the surface. She descends into profound waters, her darkness obscuring her in the shadows from predators above, her iridescent lightness blending and absorbing her into the ice, the sky and the light to predators below."

I’ve often thought that instead of forcing highschoolers & sophomores to read books that they lack the language expertise to situate, they should instead be given lots of books from the pulp era, which is about as far back as recognizably current english goes & is entirely story-driven.

Crazy Train.

"stop short of the crosswalk"

icebergmask, oorie mortmain
iron logic of maw stodgefest
       kaiju chess
as the overpass · & its orange
   antlers chortle

mackerel sky skulking
escalate vacantcost
       woods shadow
   plans' shudder
pothole counting · piqued by this smooth stretch

Barbara Allen.

( me / via)

"[O]n the first day of ‘class’, they open up the course site in Canvas, or whatever other learning management system is in use. Then, they plug in their favored AI to the site to take the course for them."

"trial & execution of mike johnson"

deeper & deeper · tranche of darkness
bare unburial · bloody tissue spool
mackerel sky · scant shelter
cluttered desk · here where it was written

AI Bots Stole My Music.

"The good host, after a dinner where much rice wine has been served, sees to it that his departing guests wear the same hats in which they came." —@harryskeeler.bsky.social

To the Old Gods.

( via / via )

"The fires were extinguished by morning, and Privoz did what it has done for nearly two hundred years: it resumed trading."

"Toad ran back to Frog.

'Frog,' said Toad, 'this kite will not fly. I give up.' "

—@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Makes me want to pick up a squeegee again.

a Constable sky scowling
homesteaded shelves
time not quite defeated
my curse & my chariot
old songs
still being played on the radio
will not save us
squozen
beneath
this Constable sky

Nowhere Man.

( via / via )

Stavropol.

"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

Pixel stovetop.

My inhuman parenting-experiment which i never got to try (no kids): have 7 nannies, one for each day of the week in order, each of whom speaks a different language. The child will grow up octolingual.

The Book of Resonance.

( via / via )

Rondeau of the good old days.

"Writing this kind of document with an uncritical use of constructs like 'superintelligence' and 'alignment' like they’re self-evidently reasonable ontological primitives (like say 'Sun' and 'Moon' for astronomy) rather than deep theological commitments (closer to 'Resurrection' and 'Transubstantiation') is either disingenuousness or an oblivious degree of religiosity." —Venkatesh Rao via

Best Venn diagram.

"Docking at Ezhou in the Evening
(written in the war years)

Through a gap in distant clouds
We see the walls of Hanyang
Like a sail floating
Could reach them in a day

The water is so calm
The merchants spend the daylight dozing
We only know the currents
By the calls of the crew at night

In the Xiang country
My grizzled hair turned to autumn
My homeward heart
On this long journey turns to the moon

Sometime during the war
My old farm and fields were lost
But far, far worse
Is the sound of drums by the river"

—Lu Lun via

Ca'canny.

( via / via )

The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

astir blue star garden
rust viaduct the vista
no-go left turn leagues now
lesson-davening pavement

What the Odyssey actually sounded like.

"I think we are watching confabulation, deliberate lies, and political spin merge into something indistinguishable." —Heather Delaney Reese

The handwritten issue of Keyhole.

( via / via )

"...he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for children, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published in Vienna in 1926, the only book of his apart from Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. (A first edition of the dictionary sold in 2005 for £75,000.)."

"Isaac Newton’s quote 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants' was later commemorated on the £2 coin, meaning that Newton simultaneously coined a phrase and phrased a coin." —@olliebray

The rabbits are still working on it.

"the black book of neville chamberlain"

High John Conqueror
lets stranded cars through
pale cerulean rollups
stopped at a railroad crossing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

summer's majesty of harm
happens unremarked
bodies ferreted off
before the sun comes up
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

in all ways heretic
as the slow walls make approach
& sing
as you were taught to sing
the drone peers
cannot see my heart

Anastatic Printing.

( via / via )

"It is a feeling of failure, loss and despair which, when pursued to its nadir, can yield new insight, and possible new avenues of exploration or modes of expression."

we have achieved liftoff
in the starry veldt
a box for manticore phlegm
damp cuff
rusted cufflinks
you have to move
the tree

these idiot games
with desp'rate outcomes

"I think of Whitman every day."

"The glittering promises of individual wealth and technologically mediated comfort and pleasure have proved almost irresistible to many human communities, and when they haven’t industrial modernity has very often been forced on recalcitrant communities by violence." —Ian Marcus Corbin via

Hegelian pun in German advert.

( me / via )

Henrietta remembered.

"FRAILTY (Anagrammed Lines)

Language has this frailty:
a hasty sunlight — a fragile,
largely aghast, faith in us...."

—Anthony Etherin

Tornado with a rainbow.

antelucan rain-hour
antlered fistful of mystics
      fin'lly set
   atop Mt Surd
orange saucer · floor that is murder

Very noir alley.

( via / me )

Cross at Stratford.

without music · into mere labyrinth
   the shadow of the words

Champion of the giant anteater.

"What finally re-carved the ground was not a better grade of politician but a broad and sustained external forcing that took a generation to build and a generation to apply – the muckrakers who made the skim visible and then intolerable, Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens on the shame of the cities, David Graham Phillips on the treason of the Senate, and behind them a mass movement that turned disgust into structural law." —Bob Tow via

Friends of the Library Sale.

( via / via )

Our quarrel don't last for years.

"Just remembering watching Christopher Hitchens on FOX News with my mother right after Jerry Falwell had passed, when he said, 'If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.' " —@rufus-hickok.bsky.social

Swan landing.

Some dry deaths in the panoply of villains,
memes unfurl with July's bad share of parch.
As errands crawl, the Resistance sweeps like pitch

on a chrome shore the Human Centipede garlands.

August with mad cicada insolence beckons
nor are we hardly done with walls of burning,
who count the clouds our foes this fervid inning.
Epic, could clown articulate the circus;

comic, except for barbed wire at the margins...

With less than radar track what's more than missile,
Pilgrim; then pack it into toothsome parcel
till layaway fulfills the cave religion's
interiority of bear-fat pigments—
other dry deaths remain but cursive figments.

Iran is on it.

( via / via )

The Dictators.

"Thirteen Poems from My Southern Garden

6
Seeking a style, culling my phrases,
Grown old carving grubs!
At dawn the moon hangs in my blinds,
A bow of jade.
Can't you see what is going on, year after year,
By the sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do
But weep in the autumn wind?"

—Goddesses, Ghosts, and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (tr J D Frodsham, 1988)

Ferris wheel in a TV cabinet.

"Flickering in the Pleiades meant trouble on the northern frontier." —Eliot Weinberger via

This tiny blessed sphere.