( via/ me )

Mamdani on St Patrick & the Irish.

“A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.”

- Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds via @jacobwren.bsky.social

"Every true work, like every true individual, is first of all a ‘that which is not'."

       "From a Window

Up here, with June, the sycamore throws
      Across the window a whispering screen;
   I shall miss the sycamore more, I suppose,
Than anything else on this earth that is out in green.
   But I mean to go through the door without fear,
   Not caring much what happens here
         When I’m away: —
How green the screen is across the panes
      Or who goes laughing along the lanes
   With my old lover all summer day."

—Charlotte Mew via

"Seagulls among pigeons are like Greek gods among mortals. The gods have the same passions, conflicts, loves, fights and losses as we do, but pursue their desires with more beauty and power than we little humans possess."

( via / via )

Sequoia live.

"MIDNIGHT (Anagrammed Lines)

Lawless midnight forever composes
verse from compelling shadows. I set
scenes from the improvised gallows,
the slow, simple coverings of dreams."

—@anthonyetherin

The research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.

"George III

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder."

—E C Bentley

"People will destroy people’s entire lives for $55k because they want to feel like they are tangibly doing the things they believe need to be done in the world, which is the same reason people “compromise” to publish with the Big 5..."

( me / via )

"My focus was shifting."

"Elfwisk – a Hookland dialect word for fate. While it can be translated as god-wished, it's more often used to imply that ill or fortunate happenstances in a person’s life are being manipulated by unseen forces of a somewhat lower order, often for no reason other than their fierce merriment." —@hookland.bsky.social

"This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials.."

white enamel iron chairs
in the cold early light
pennies, paperbacks

elfwisk

"Unless I am much mistaken, this is not the sort of reception generally accorded to poets in America today."

( via / via)

The Poets are Dying.

"THE FAILED CARTOGRAPHER (Palindrome)

Demand a hill, at solid nadir….
Damn it!
One morn,
I saw I was in Rome,
not in Madrid,
and I lost all I had named...."

@anthonyetherin

"Henry sats in de bar & was odd.."

"While close overhead clap the quick mocking palms of the Storm-Fiend" —Sheridan LeFanu

Diary of Avro Lancaster.

( via / via )

My poem in Enochian.

"They’re telling me a great empire will be destroyed if I attack Persia. Even the oracles who don’t like me very much, very nasty, they all said to me, “Sir, it’s one of the great empires, and it’ll be destroyed. And all because you attacked Persia.” That’s what they’re telling me."
—kenjennings.bsky.social

The Silence of the Badlands.

            "to be smothered in cassia"

stabilimenta · in the scarecrow web
       way station
   worn desert sign
dreams of a glorious · green headlight
notepaper damp · nimble the bardquill
       cuneiform
   ruminations
as heavy night falls · across fierce acres
squandermurk · vermilion brillig
       one good word
   the wound stanching

Ethics.

( via / via )

Friction car of the future.

"I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
'It is futile,' I said,
'You can never —'

'You lie,' he cried,
And ran on."

—Stephen Crane via @RobertAllenPoet / via

Polydream.

"While I do not believe suffering is good, I do believe that it is meaningful. " —Darcey Steinke via

Windcatchers.

( via / via )

Weil on the cause of wars.

"Compromise solution: we replace Winston Churchill with a badger on the bank notes, but we genetically engineer all actual badgers to have the exact face of Winston Churchill. Everybody wins." —@lastpositivist.bsky.social

"...it’s a type of music anyone who’s explored the avant-garde has wondered about, a sort of glorious indiscriminate mash-up of everything"

"AT DAWN (Anagrammed Lines)

Shades flood dawn, in a memory
of meadows and soil and rhyme —
in dreams made only of shadow…. "

—@anthonyetherin

"These are not easy questions, but Cicero was in an excellent position to evaluate them.

( via / oil painting by me )

Team Animism.

weak coffee a waif sips
in the worn dark circling
heinous parable pinebox
porch light regolith scorching
crosshatch filled-in fistula
refer peppermint flatiron
where the sludge forms slabs
a slate of glib fireworks
still our routine tingles
attesting best practice
graves robbed for the granular
scrimshaw, grotto football

Edward Gorey and His Githerments.

"surely one of the all-time great (and forgotten) moments in history was when Proust was called gay in print by Jean Lorrain, also gay, and they went to the Meudon forest to have a pistol duel, both tried to kill the other, and both missed." —@simsben1

Exploring Khmer temples in Northeastearn Thailand.

( me / via )

The Willows.

"But the empty streets of Tokyo that night did not feel like a lost future. Rather, it felt as if reality itself were slipping away into a void. The present itself was disappearing." —Hana via

The place where Caesar was stabbed is now a cat sanctuary.

orchestrate inmost · urn shattering
      these discards
   & adroit thefts
Wuhan weathering · in a wave of nowls
just doesn't seem · ascent worth making
      boarded up
   bare cell for years
fumble the thimble · therapy dog

"On the same Syrian coast, a Venetian noted with surprise in 1553 that the ‘Mores’, ‘sprinkle snow on their food and dishes as we would sugar’."

( me / via )

Solving the sidewalk fossil keyboard mystery.

"message from the grave"

rose garden no riddle
marooned Lego playground
missilefall maze season

mighty fine decline-yen
hüzün in the hewn path
hushed the tardy garden

these cities that served us
assail ev'ry Grail quest
erase other month page

roseless hardware garden
glowing green bunny

Paul Robeson.

"Two years ago, we did not have to think about an army of tacticool-looking, redneck motherfuckers driving government vehicles around, just looking for excuses to ask people for their papers. We also did not have to find space in our psyche to accept that many people—people who eat hamburgers, pay with US dollars, watch TV commercials about weight loss drugs, people like us—find that as unoffensive a development as a new variety of toothpaste." —J Mimulus via

Foundation.

( via / via )

1-hour ambient horror soundscape inspired by John Carpenter, isolation, and imagined freezing stillness.

"GARDEN OF EDEN (Palindrome)

I made, in Eden, a cradle.
Here we were held.
Arcane, denied am I."

—@anthonyetherin

Hüzün.

      "Dahiyah"

duckspeak doula · ghoulish goulash
   mall where i tore the tickets
while i worked on my painting · under wasp-regard
   which paid for The Cantos
& what you love well · isn't always saved
died the pic's purchaser · & she i painted it for
   bulldozers took the mall
little by little · as i watched
   & a plague took the world

Location and Background of 'The Oldest View'.

( via / via )

In Praise of the Dying Earth.

"I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa
the straight road between the cedars

You thought
I was a man of roads
and you loved me for being such a man
I was not such a man

I was lost
when I met you on the road
to Larissa"

—Leonard Cohen

The naming of winds.

A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for a thousand years.

What are AI's pronouns?

( via / via )

"I wish to preserve the difference between text and life and to avoid subjugating one to the other."

"The art looks as if disasters have passed through it, but it also looks as if it had survived those disasters and as if the strewn pieces of it could be assembled into something quite superior." —R A Lafferty via

Danse Macabre.

"The Bird with the Dark Plumes

'The bird with the dark plumes in my blood,
That never for one moment, however I patched my truces,
Consented to make peace with the people,
It is pitiful now to watch her pleasure in a breath of tempest
Breaking the sad promise of spring.
Are these that morose hawk's wings, vaulting, a mere mad swallow's,
The snow-shed peak, the violent precipice?
Poor outlaw that would not value their praise do you prize their blame?
'Their liking' she said 'was a long creance,
But let them be kind enough to hate me, that opens the sky.'
It is almost as foolish my poor falcon
To want hatred as to want love; and harder to win."

—Robertson Jeffers

Bardo.

( me / via )

Your mouth with golden lips.

"different sides of the aisle"

sidecar return
wheypool
wheypool doomcookies
paleo
as an adjective
prizes handed out
to one side of the gibbet

"We cannot go back to the self that lacks the experience of desiring."

"Every time science advances, part of an art becomes a science, so art loses a little bit. Yet, mysteriously, art always seems to register a net gain, because as we understand more we invent new things that we can't explain to computers." —Don Knuth via

My 29 Favorite Novels.

( me / via )

Becoming a Plague.

"Distractedly pawing at the old notebooks, ambushed by their scratchy configurations of desire.

Barthes: 'the fragment is a spoilsport.'

And: '. . . the problem of writing: how to put up with the fact that the great flood I have within me leads in the best of cases to a rivulet of writing.' "—@lattaj.bsky.social

Mini photozine maker.

"The Modern Poet’s Word Hoard

Hwaet!
Amid ancient hills alive with song
This wordsmith sits, with winking lights.
A wireless network, the world wide web
At my fingertips – friend, or foe?

Well …
Strange and wonderful space stallions surging
Farting fireballs, bright flame leapers
Climb heavenwards to the comet’s riding.
Newton’s progeny, the planet pilgrim,
Explores the emptiness, outward bound,
Carrying mankind’s message to a million stars,
Voyager, void hurdler, slowly vanishing.

But …
Back on earth, ensnared by the Internet,
That seducer of time and solver of puzzles,
That sleepless data-dragon on its mound of dark desires
Hoarding a billion wisdoms and wild dreams battling,
All facts, fictions, fantasies avid for attention.
This work of tech giants has created galleries of kittens,
Floods of fake news, and friends’ news, feeding the beast.

And …
Words are carried across the wind ridden ether,
Distance devoured, time zones denied,
Pictures follow from my pocket-talker,
Face-speaker, far-friend hailer,
Stalker of strangers, snapper of selfies,
A digital harp for my music board,
A library of stories lights up my screen,
The kindness of Kindle keeps me well read.

A riddle …
A nadir of culture, a nemesis of poetry,
A chance to find a wider fellowship.
What am I called?"

—Phyllis Wicks at FGR

"Why does death come to mind when thinking of love."

( oil painting by me / via )

Vertigo/ Solastalgia.

"forbidden island"

Nemesis unceasing
in suq antelucan
my own glib betrayals
trawl no shallower Glasnost
fed up with flerd ardent
flourishes yet, unfettered;
but Nemesis is Sampo
one grim bony motor
Nemesis will nitpick
narc where you laid darkness
the cells of your braille body
bode Nemesis its hymnal
Nemesis unceasing
till season's tall falling
too bad for the munchkins
whose modest urge burgeoned

First, try to be something, anything, else.

"As the tour continued, I thought how strange and sad it was: my grandmother, who had endured exile and displacement, now treated as a visitor in a museum that had once been her home."
—Ayşe Osmanoğlu via

Japanese Aesthetics for Life and Death: In Praise of Shadows, Fades, Fragments.

( me / via )

"Let us turn first to that evergreen truth: the only time poetry ever makes the news is when poets fight."

"Publishing a weekly substack is like running a one-woman newspaper for an imaginary town that doesn’t exist." —@laurafaulkneristyping

We're all being eaten.

"Ramadan, Lent, Spring Break"

heart's Valhalla-foothold
heralded splint-winter
torn up road uproarious
with risk-averse esquires

where the torus tumbles
too much of a suchness

"And heatstroke took the piglets’ lives."

( via / me )

"A young white girl with bad tattoos was getting expertly braided by a woman in a shower cap, and I watched for a bit — the braiding was a bit like watching a Florentine master expertly re-string a lute. Art is everywhere, and some of it is good."

         "glint among matte shadows"

      flickering
   shadow shamrock
      whispering
   mutilation
smithereens summoned
sasquatch open casket
the dartk light years yeckate
coyote sips spritzer
      Mussorgsky
   coded malware
      gallop bumps
   better than smooth
the pitch made by Paddock
paltry skulk i'll take it
delete liar's contest
politer chirg ragweed
      scintillant
   surging darkness
      drove the snakes
   snazzy dumpster
derringer chess chapbook
with charred pages bordered
redbrick igloo runagate
the roost of bright stooges
      flickering
   though our wyrd flows
      castles stormed
   inside shards strewn
someone has the Sampo
circulates cloud powder
not yet scattered scry-notes
scowling like appall-solace

This is still the realest thing ever said about America.

"Time's a credible dice

Time sacred, I bled ice."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Elms.

( me / via )

Darmok Revisited.

"Verlaine’s pistol he used to shoot Rimbaud was once up for auction and was starting for around $80,000. I had about half that saved up from work + student loans + student grants and awards at the time. I thought maybe I could hawk everything I owned (computer, guitars, record collection, rare books) and sell my twink ass a bit to make up the rest. If I’d spent that money on the pistol, I would have had to drop out of school because I’d have no tuition money and would have been broke and homeless and in debt. Some nights I actually lie awake in bed soaking in my regret."
—Eris at Discordia Review

A fateful encounter with a poet.

"Lacaille 9352"

just king & the king's goons
carrying out foreplay
pale cerulean ragtime
berates the dung beetle

pillage the shrunk portions
on portico hoedown
no one stops at red lights
no one meets deadlines

we'll let mint massacres
mention us at floss time
overplus dusk aidles
car driving with tire flat

books i wrote reissued
robot-hoovered covers
the trestle my spraypaint
sprinkled now thankless

the king's gravel fortress
festers in its own time
never-sleep room's slippage
sly enough Fafnir

The greatest poem of all time was writ by an anonymous samurai.

( via / via )

The Eternal Return.

"a night full of shoes"      (—Carrie Fisher)

cyborg days & lost keys
lemmingtrust, with gremlins
harm festival firehosed
to find the right mindset

fury in the urn night

Persephone/ Hades.

"He was a philosopher named Émile-Auguste Chartier, but everybody called him 'Alain.' (That was his pen name.) He suggested to Weil that she ought to fix her handwriting." —Robert Minto via

Sonata.

( via / via )

Bleep.

"Jugglers seem closer to god than other creatures of the carnival" —@donaldboat

Mind my sword.

"Rounding up the Mimes

They shunned the suburbs, trailer parks and farms.
Somewhere they had their silent neighborhood—
for who has ever lived next door to mimes?

Wherever they did live, they paid their taxes
from pocket change, obeyed our traffic laws,
and turned their radios down very low
so passers-by would never hear their songs.

Lacking identifiable positions
on anything important, they seemed…'Swiss.'
White face paint hinted at a racist past.
When tabloids called, they never would deny
connections with the Mafia or Roswell.
At the French Embassy, a mime was hung
by his suspenders as a mob denounced
Marcel Marceau; some vigilantes smeared
a mime with bacon fat and chicken feathers,
then left him flailing by a KFC;
kids trapped another one inside a box
of glass for days—and told him to 'pretend
to eat a sandwich.' For their own protection,
all mimes were taken into custody.

We watched as they were crowded into vans,
still gesturing with pouts and outstretched palms."

—Midge Goldberg via

"Any regimes that need changing, including the US, Israel, and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.."

( via / via )

Fly Me to the Moon.

"Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

Isn’t the moon dark too, most of the time?
And doesn’t the white page seem unfinished
without the dark stain of alphabets?
When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness.
Instead he invented ebony and crows
and that small mole on your left cheekbone
Or did you mean to ask 'Why are you sad so often?'
Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed."

—Linda Pastan

This is how i imagine my poems.

"WORD FACT

A phrasal anagram is a two-word phrase whose words use exactly the same letters in the same quantities.

Some personal favourites:

Remote meteor

Supersonic percussion

Soapstone teaspoons

Integral triangle

Persistent prettiness

Aristotelian retaliations

Daemonic comedian (the title of my next poetry collection....)" —@anthonyetherin

"Karma entered Western languages not because translators found an English equivalent but because speakers gradually agreed that no equivalent existed."

( via / via )

Khmer.

"That is when the clarity arrived, sharp and useless: I had been building the record against myself every day for months." —Heather Léger via

Srey No (Lady Name No).

"daily summary"

sad sep'rate inscriptions
Moltbook ate my homework
parables of Rach Three
poison berries to foison

All these billionaires.

( via / via )

Rippling.

"crown shyness"

to lose human lampshades
yet livelihood in spinning
far from the frontlines
fascist gewgaws droogs clutch

zany substack zigzag
berserk scrolling tollway
can't pause sizzling pavement
pasteup spills my abasement

"D.C. may not be a creative city, but I, a pretentious and annoying flake, got twelve RSVPs to my shoebox apartment for twelve poets to get drunk on absinthe and recite poetry on a Tuesday night, with only a week’s notice. The game was on."

"I had resolved to give up smoking today. Then I woke up and remembered the existence of AI. I have now resolved to smoke more." —@alexanderfayne

"Oh, by the way, there’s going to be a crisis in helium. Sound[]s not like a big deal, until you notice that helium is essential to the production of superconductors. 30% of it also passes through the Strait of Hormuz."

( via / me )

Procrustean turn for this timeline, i'm all popcorn.

"If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks." —Geoff Ryman

This would indicate to me the existence of a complex society to acculturate to. Probably had schools, intellectuals, & bloggers.

"Against Refrain

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

A marionette’s awakening
and flexing of limbs that chafe
like wooden chimes

A song whose feet are bare
the better they might balance on each
root-note that appears

The sound of breath not quite controlled—
not quite the concertina
but the bellows

      *

Perhaps this coal-dragged dancer fought
the wrong side of a war

and spared from swinging
punishes herself

by limping through a regimen
of grace

      *

Or maybe this benighted piece
was once contender for
the National Anthem

and it would take some dusting off
to rescue from the hiss
another turn

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
again

a novel world
of novel gravity
entangling her

Like dreams in which we try
to wade through water—
dreams in which the mind maintains
it can command the body
with even less of a claim

And so this former dancer finds
herself as just another
dream refiner

But clad in the state of the novel art—
a deepsea diver of empty heavens—
she listens for the rhythm
of the slipstream
of her pulse

the only sound she can
and must keep close

as with no atmosphere
there is no noise

      *

A murder of crows aggressively clears
its throat and shuffles up and down
a gutter like the brim of an old
hat (though everything is old
compared to Aves’ death-defying

bounds!)

      *

The sound of someone learning to dance
against refrain

the way air resonates
with shaky ground

as ‘dance’ itself reorders the sounds in ‘sound’ "

—@huckastley

"Authors have always elided reality, shoving their means of survival into the background so as to give over more words to other subjects. But in doing so they can sometimes accidentally give us the impression that they are floating above normal life, rather than engaging with it."