The Oral Literature of the American People.
"I have ridden steppe ponies across the plains of Inner Mongolia, I have meditated under the tree where the Buddha first attained enlightenment, I have seen the ruins of Aztec monuments made from human skulls plastered with lime, but I’d still managed to go thirty-five years without once setting foot on the next island over." —Sam riss via
"DISTANT MUSIC (Palindrome)
Emote to me. Refill a note.
By eking, I sedate my awe.
Now all I give, lines dash, promote,
to visit inward — rose, yet raw.
Art eyes, or drawn it is. I vote
to morph sad, senile vigil. Law,
one way, met a design I key.
Be tonal, life remote to me!"
—Anthony Etherin
"...the French Republican Calendar, which I adopted shortly after the electoral Ragnarok of 2024.."
“Dear, so thou only move thine head,
Shall all mine old despairs awake!”
—Dowson
"The new book idea I started working on even before the first one had come out gathers digital dust in the neglected corners of my computer, but what do you know? You might turn your head away for a second, and your home and your people are on fire and the flames lick inside to your heart and brain and guts, burning away all that feels unnecessary, leaving just enough breath for a strangled cry of help that no one hears." —Saghar Setareh via
slendermanian slide rule
slick leather case, sunk Facebook
brillig dusk
to be sorted
the news nattering · anempst Crashsound
rain scrabbling Zog's ribcage
ruin-deep swirl leapfrog
With reference to David Lindsay's "jale" & "ulfire".
"Every writer I know from my MFA years has stopped writing." —Chris Stuck via
"robo advisor"
screwworm cuneiform
on Omaha Beach
dying of sadness
"Some names stay because they became part of the first map you made of yourself."
Glyconic meter & Alliterating Tumbling Meter.
“NIGHTS WITHOUT SLEEP
Nights without sleep and days
That burn like smoldering fire,
Nerves with the ceaseless cry
Of wind in a tight-drawn wire—
Years of this leaving me nothing
But a handful of songs like these,
That people think were happily written
In an hour of ease.”
—Sara Teasdale
"But what do you mean, the purpose of life is happiness? That’s like saying the purpose of milk is cheese." —Alexander Fayne via
"If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint."
"The Dread is faded, durable, pervasive. It sounds like a ceiling fan motor in the back of my soul. I try to sit up straight, take deep breaths, look at the sun on the leaves on the trees outside.
But it doesn’t help, it just shifts everything around like a snow-globe filled with confetti..."
—Brandon Smith via
iI you're not saying 'torpify,' that's a skill issue.
"Moorawathimeering
Into moorawathimeering
Where atninga dare not tread,
Leaving wurly for a wilban,
Tallabilla, you have fled.
Wombalunga curses, waitjurk—
Though we cannot break the ban,
And follow tchidna further
After one-time karaman.
Far in moorawathimeering
Safe from wallan darenderong,
Tallabilla waitjurk, wander
Silently the whole day long.
Go with only lilliri
To walk along beside you there,
While douran-douran voices wail
And Karaworo beats the air."
—Rex Ingamells via
"106. Spring, Watching
The country is smashed; mounts and rivers persist.
It is spring in the castle; grass and trees are thick.
Feeling the times — flowers sprinkle tears.
Regretting the goodbye — birds astonish my heart.
Beacons have been kept lit for three months;
A letter from home will be worth ten thousand gold.
I scratch my whitened head … it has become shorter again:
All of it will not hold a hairpin."
—Du Fu via
"In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour… " — Egon Schiele via
"Where are the princes of the heathen become, and such as ruled the beasts upon the earth..."
"Robinson also, as Elliott points out, can lay claim to the astonishing distinction of being, 'the only Australian poet ever, perhaps, to carry the whole of his repertoire in his head; he has always scorned poets who could not remember their verses and speak them, as well as print them.' "
—Lucas Smith via
"The vulgarity begins when sharing ceases to be an offering and becomes leakage."
"four june bugs"
murkswaddled midrash · march as numbered teeth
muggy air
eerie brillig
blood fragrance frabjous
fracture of a sick child
Aerodynamics of a guinea pig, visualized.
"Song of the Horseman
Córdoba.
Remote and lonely.
Jet-black mare and full round moon,
With olives in my saddle bags.
Although I know the road so well
I shall not get to Córdoba.
Across the plain, across the wind,
Jet-black mare and full red moon,
Death is gazing down upon me,
Down from the towers of Córdoba.
Ay! The road so dark and long.
ay! My mare so tired yet brave.
Death is waiting for me there
Before I get to Córdoba.
Córdoba.
Remote and lonely."
--Garcia Lorca (tr Roy Campbell) [In Lojban.]
Signs of Fascism nicely displayed.
"Galsworthy apparently coined a new word (and a good phrase); 'the mufflement of circumstance'." —@anthonybevilacqua395559
"...self-employment wasn’t a career choice so much as a diagnosis."
" Only heroes could survive in the maelstrom, and only idiots would want to." —Nero Wolfe via
"It no longer feels like an emergency. It feels like weather."
"a flicker sandwich in Memison"
grugprab grindstone · gruelling plush
pixel hamster wheel
overpriced lattes · wielding laser cats
Prairie Creek bivouacs
slow to a crawl · at the train crossing
there are never any trains
this cattle car stands still
"Then I reflected upon its peculiarities, and told myself: The gods that built this place were mad."
"Heatherdale"
tan overpass urnferry
apogee of mapfire
subfusc welkin wisp bag
weary to land andirons
flicker in stark staying
stumble among lungfish
indigo perfused fardels
effectively fake brake-pedal
sifting plankton secrets
pothole by pothole in the motley
stabilized fall stillborn
stumble among lungfish
"The uncanny allure of whimsy conjoined with doom, sad Christmases, playground loneliness."
"What gives a person born in 2005 nightmares from 1994?" —Carol Grant via
"It's worth noting that the people selling AI have no problem with the idea of a conscious, sentient entity that exists only to do uncompensated work for them--an entity to which they have no ethical obligations, and one whose wishes or needs are of absolutely no interest; a consciousness which can be called into existence or snuffed out as thoughtlessly as you would turn a light switch on or off. That is exactly what they think of you too." —Sing or Swim via
"metallic red owlclip"
crew Gilligan's Island
gully ullage
gerdanlouk-lit · endgame
think of the dry season
empty bookcase · in the garage
hail Gilligan's Hamlet
haruspicial dishpan
"Having failed to un-brainwash myself, I thought about how to proceed."
golden leaves against
slate gray sky after so much
staring at pixels
" 'Chasm' feels like the correct word to describe what is left behind, because what has been done to the future, in a process that still seems nowhere near its conclusion, is essentially an extraction of possibility." —Julian Brant via
Sudden Jock Pointe Shoe Ekphrasis.
"Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time really at its center, in the same way all humans imagine themselves to be situated at the center of the world. This illusion of perspective situates us in the center of space; a similar illusion falsifies the sense of time in us; and again another similar illusion arranges the whole hierarchy of values around us. This illusion even extends to our sense of existence, because of the intimate connection between the sense of value and the sense of being within us. Being seems less and less concentrated the further it is from us." —Simone Weil via
"Basil Clench"
turquoise hum
hasty gurgle
ascian grid
of the doomed days
old crimes hilch
in the hopper
polaroid
trapped entity
"I forgot to turn off the electric. Would you mind doing it for me please."
"Australia has 2 great loves and both of them float."
auburn brown interview
iron Denebola bedrock
redbrick corridor crackling
cry, halcyon highway,
tranche of troubled auburn
"The CSS encryption layer that Hollywood spent the entire 1990s defending in federal court was bypassed transparently in the background by a library called libdvdcss, written by a Norwegian teenager in 1999, now bundled inside every modern media player on every operating system." —Patrick Quirk via
"Heidegger, who admired Celan's work, tried to make him feel welcome in Freiburg. He even asked a book-dealer friend to go around all the bookshops in the city making sure they put Celan titles in their windows so the poet would see them as he walked through town. This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice." --Sarah Bakewell, The Existentialist Cafe (2016)
"sounds"
never enough slackness
all needs seek fulfillment
incidental music
festers on the vine
dim fluorescents dowsing
derelict ricochet
pickled whispers
“Reckless Biscuits” (Vancouver Island)
You don’t see many crows around here
they prefer the really remote areas
of extreme latitude, and ageless brooding forest…
where, interlacing their severe discourse,
the silence becomes another orator
mor baroque than the rest, whose necessary lapses
—a leaf’s fission, a breeze rattling dry branches—
are awaited often for days, among the treetops.
I enjoy the technology in old movies (dial phones, great cars, manual typewriters) & the obsolete pop culture & defunct slang in books, as interesting in themselves. I've spent enough time in certain periods that there's not much that gets past me anymore. This is a good thing to have.
I have books on high shelves, i have books on low shelves. I even have a few big, heavy books that take both hands to lift. And i have books in boxes i have to uncover from a stack of other book boxes. I get plenty of exercise with my books. (That’s not even counting the miles i have browsed in used bookstores.)
No, it's because their cell phones kept getting smaller & smaller.
"Rust
Riding in the backs of cars
At night wrapped up in the illusion
Of getting out as light pollution
Drowsily gives way to stars
How often have I put my trust
In one-time strangers at the wheel
And prayed that I could make the toll
With coins like hubcaps dark from rust?
Time, perhaps, to turn my attention
Away from the buckshot-riddled sky
And study with somnambulant eyes
The unknown figure riding shotgun"
—@huckastley
"Word Made Flesh
Word whose breath is the world-circling atmosphere,
Word that utters the world that turns the wind,
Word that articulates the bird that speeds upon the air,
Word that blazes out the trumpet of the sun,
Whose silence is the violin-music of the stars,
Whose melody is the dawn, and harmony the night,
Word traced in water of lakes, and light on water,
Light on still water, moving water, waterfall
And water colours of cloud, of dew, of spectral rain,
Word inscribed on stone, mountain range upon range of stone,
Word that is fire of the sun and fire within
Order of atoms, crystalline symmetry,
Grammar of five-fold rose and six-fold lily,
Spiral of leaves on a bough, helix of shells,
Rotation of twining plants on axes of darkness and light,
Instinctive wisdom of fish and lion and ram,
Rhythm of generation in flagellate and fern,
Flash of fin, beat of wing, heartbeat, beat of the dance,
Hieroglyph in whose exact precision is defined
Feather and insect-wing, refraction of multiple eyes,
Eyes of the creatures, oh myriadfold vision of the world,
Statement of mystery, how shall we name
A spirit clothed in world, a world made man?"
—Kathleen Raine
This drama is ancient history.
"The Russian propaganda weapon is not built only to persuade you.
It is built to exhaust you. To stuff up your brain."
—Gavril Ducu via
Glory, Glory. (thx Melanie!)
"The moment of absolute clarity comes just when you stub your toe upon the bed." —Will G. via
"LUCIFER (Palindrome by Pairs)
Seraphic one,
my divine sire,
fate fires
in ivy, demonic phrase."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world."
"Microtonal virtuosos have been going viral a lot recently: Maddie Ashman, Bryan Deister."
"pith helmet"
passage to Nineveh
packaged in pale cerulean
sputter on layaway
Crashsound gold-vermilion
anchors aweigh
pirates on holiday
ransack the wealth of ages
bent heads pursue their play
careless of broken edges
anchors aweigh
passage to Nineveh
"I write poetry so I can leave behind these frail, brittle memory cicada shells"
—@poemakontsa.bsky.social
"i love it when the clock strikes 10:30 every morning and the usual sites publish their 3 infuriating news stories that will drive all discourse today like zookeepers raising the enclosure's gate and letting the seals get into the day's bucket of chum" —@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com
Mad Magazine from 1991. (With Crumb in the replies!)
"Weimar solutions"
pale cerulean window
trauma porn
kilnforward courier
catalogue page wedgekrieg
stone lion in styrofoam
it could still rain
pale Ramones
Beethoven's Ninth bone-house
bright trapdoor, trucks both lanes
seeing the web
when i see nothing
"Mieterscham"
Renner burning runway
rista of Creek Canyon
swart go-juice
assuages theft
labyrinth learned · sienna contrails
eye in the sky scurry
scaffold & dull laughtrack
self-wheeled to the wharf cliff
overpass
blinking portal
you will find · no friendzone
outside Emathia
"O miseranda domus, toto nil orbe videbis
Tutius Emathia."
—Pharsalia VI.819-820
"Ah wretched Race! to whom the world can yield
No safer refuge, than Emathia's Field."
—Rowe's Lucan
"...the sort of jokes that Italians make about the Venetians and the Tuscans are rather similar to the jokes that the English make about the Scottish, for whom beer is a soft drink and for whom, as a Scottish friend of mine once told me:
'the word fuck’s like a comma.' " —Alexander Fayne via
You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.
"bread too wide for the toaster"
no better mammal now
that i should not have squandered
depths unsounded,
sheets i might have written on.
but fragrant hours arrive,
replete with puzzling auras:
no stern kairos'
green noise posed which red did solve.
where would forgiveness come,
if not from finding further wrongs
& broken lungs
along the road of fire-slalom.
"Moonrise, June 19, 1876
I woke in the midsummer not-to-call night
in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe
of a fingernail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit,
lovely in waning but lustreless
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow
of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp yet clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him
entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight,
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me
eyelid and eyelid of slumber."
—Gerard Manley Hopkins via @rhunedhel.bsky.social
"For as long as the city has existed, appalled visitors have fantasised about all of this collapsing."
"I’ve never done pay-per-view, but I’d pay to watch his name removed from the Kennedy Center live" —@beinghelpish.bsky.social
Pride flag made from real nasa imagery .
"His sense of the discourse around ‘the Great LPs’ in popular music is that there is a conventional main-stream canon – Beatles, Stones, male singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell, their ilk – curated by magazines like Mojo, Rolling Stone and Record Collector, that gets all the public attention and discussion, and that makes all the money for record dealers. Floating above the public canon, however, there is an entirely separate shadow-canon of records, quite thoroughly understood and acknowledged by the collector-initiates, but listened to and known about by almost nobody else.
This is what has happened to the literary canon as well." —Paddy Bullard via
"Beowulf is dense with them. By my count, there are at least 129 kennings.."
inscrutable electronica
on this bridge late at night
in this blazing noon reverie
spring was a dream
even as it fed us
