Emendations.

( via / via )

A common misconception.

"Your ’artistic voice’ isn’t something you invent. It’s something you gradually recognise. Your job is to listen. It will already be there."

"I myself, during 60 years of writing for publication, have never needed anything but grammatically sound sentences for the countless things that I’ve wanted to put into words." —Gerald Murnane via

Colorized tornado i think.

( me / via )

Fasano's tribute.

“Leave only three wasps alive in the whole of Europe and the air of Europe will still be more crowded with wasps than space is with stars.” —Sir James Jeans

Jordan Belson retrospective.

erosive tanks tussle
toylike through fraught woods
locked out threat game threnody
within Fimbulthwart
frexious thrip
is snake trove

"But if there’s anything the road will teach you, it’s that none of us is where we are for any good reason at all."

( via / me )

"Whole chapters are dedicated to the evil portents which foretell the fall of various Emperors."

cloven hoof rock
foggy setback

crust strife
sage dowse moon

voy dire

"The books are dense, navigational, built for return visits. The only complication is that the game does not exist."

--What makes something poetry?

Aside from the inescapable timebound (faddish) criteria, these two seem to be permanent:

1. "yugen", or mysterious beauty; i.e. resonance with the subconscious. (in the 18c.--often called the least poetical time for english-- this was not expected nor sought.)

2. "calliditas", or concise aptness. Some--a very few--good poets lack this (Whitman, Jeffers) but there will always be those who refuse them the first rank for this reason.

I would also add: "melopoeia" or phonetic coherence (for some time now, in eclipse); "phanopoeia" or visual imagery; & "logopoeia" or conceptual originality (these are Pound's coinages).

"Poignancy" belongs in here somewhere, but since every age draws the line between pathos & bathos differently, i can only suggest that poetry must be about the human feelings & situations which are thought to be worth exploring at that time. Nowadays bad childhoods & famous artists appear frequently, while epics on the founding of political dynasties would be a very hard sell.

Having one of these excellences is sufficient; but having many of them is still better.

(2003)

Ghoul-haunted woodland.

( via / via )

Nine movies that capture the aftermath of 9-11. (via Joshua Rothkopf)

"Not only did the Edsel outsell the cybertruck, it sold almost twice as well.

The Edsel sold about 116,000 units over two years.

The cybertruck? 63k." —@stephenblackmore.com

The Hadronic Seeress and Other Wyrd Tales (2025).

"PRESIDENTS

The president of shame has his own flag
the president of lies quotes the voice
of God
as last counted
the president of loyalty recommends
blindness to the blind
oh oh
applause like the heels of the hanged
he walks on eyes
until they break
then he rides
there is no president of grief
it is a kingdom
ancient absolute with no colors
its ruler is never seen
prayers look for him
also empty flags like skins
silence the messenger runs through the vast lands
with a black mouth
open
silence the climber falls from the cliffs
with a black mouth like
a call
there is only one subject
but he is repeated
tirelessly"

—W S Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders (1970)

Bowie.

( via / via )

Answer to Fermi Paradox just dropped. (via Jorie Graham)

      "unclean thing"

unclean thing begone
gnarly lure of flycraft
      diligent
   skull burrower
give us this day · our daily Krasnov

Hollerith Shanghai
Boabdil addendum
      Hugging Face
   hootenanny
fast times · in the Führerbunker

Building monuments to alien gods.

"Was ever an insect flying between two flowers
Told less than we are told of what we are?"

—Cavender's House

Dread Pirate Roberts in Dallas. (thread)

( me / via )

"...a friend who attended San Diego State University told me he voted Republican only so that his diploma would come adorned with the Terminator’s autograph."

"There may be places in us all where things
Live that would make us run if we should see them."

—Cavender's House

Laughing While Leaving.

"It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountains and of plain,—
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem,—
The summer's empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen,—
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been."

—Dickinson

"I cannot speak for someone else’s wounds. But I know what it is to be healed by something born from those wounds."

( via/ via )

Sonnet to Sleep (lipogram & lipogram translation).

encased in 'splainin' narpools
school zone world, gnostic
      bullion
   & faded shame
erse to inks · my iracund word

tricorne tarn patrolling
tryst azure & crash pad
      carillon
   smoke rises
watched by all · on their small screens

Modern shaped poem.

"I picked that year — call it 2014 — because I’d say that was the last little gasp of the blogosphere’s cultural relevance. Blogs still exist, sure, but they are institutional, professional, and (to employ a term that will read as very mid-twenties ten years from now), niche."
—Biblioklept via

Leaf by leaf.

( via / via )

Person to draw any seine.

"Out of nearly sixty presentations, more than two-thirds were some variation of 'here is how AI is impacting my practice.' " —Wrath Mania via

Bayeux tie-ins.

      "color banished"

pratfall flurry
loom output noisefire
pillow stepped on
chase
brim pentacle poemclasp
appoint joint ratchet
face turned away fandom
      filigree
   smoke of sapphire
chase figments · in a frail landscape

eclipse dust din branded
determine next turmoil
      law of things
   their own landfall
landfill take my map minefields
little enough vanquish · the vague velleities

abrogate all bruntlapse
Brutalist foyer coin toss
      as the wind
   of madness wones
too many glints · that once were gladness

"Evidently, letting literary intellectuals give a definition of culture is like letting billionaires decide how much tax they ought to pay."

( via / via )

A familiar place that becomes increasingly strange.

"helicopterese" (The Matrix, 1999)

1.
greenish golden light
in some encumbered alley
your chimp shades resting

in some encumbered alley
redbrick & bruised passage
& no certain turning

your chimp shades resting
where a moment back you tarried
crushed now beneath fathoms

2.
it is red pill or blue pill
it is Bhopal Chernobyl
nimble but to squander

it is Bhopal Chernobyl
shiver under Saturn
sleek black van

nimble but to squander
squidwise inkier delve
it is red pill or blue pill

The only Iron Man.

"She was ready to skip town much earlier than I was, probably around the time my car was stolen from in front of our apartment. That same week we stayed up all night waiting for the evacuation warning, as the flames crept down from the mountain and wiped the town above us off the map." —Henry Begler via

Storyteller's Wisdom.

( via / via )

Jekyll Island.

"john fetterman is the first rat in history to climb onto a sinking ship." —@covie93.bsky.social

THE END OF SUMMER (Palindrome).

4.
silence remains
through cruel zones
fought standstill
called cowboy reef

"...she saw the vast desert as a feminist space that should not be plundered for its resources." (thread)

( via / via )

Joy.

2.
trek evasions swarm
no right school
fishhook out

that long boil

3.
dead thousands
sot knaveries
i should laugh
all those void rules

Boon.

"For [VALIE] EXPORT, this was precisely the emancipatory effect. The rejection of unambiguity, intelligibility and communicative constraints shows a resistance to those symbolic and political orders that determine who is allowed to speak, how one should speak and which bodies are considered capable of speaking at all. " —Thomas D Trummer via

I like to imagine myself trapped in some kind of non-euclidean alien prison made of concrete rooms the size of planet.

( via / me )

"The punk and the metalhead both hate their high-school principal; the punk writes a song about the high-school principal, but the metalhead writes a song about harvesting the souls of the weak astride a stainless-steel warhorse."

"People are writing by hand again (especially in college classrooms!), they’re printing little booklets and zines, they’re generating new forms of piety and reverence towards printed text and swearing off the digital like it’s the drink." —Beatrice Marovich via

Last and First Men (2020) [on flash drive].

"Navier-Stokes"

1.
sin overtakes
wood font;
doubtboyg spiels

& bright pools
what art.

A Trade Darker than Magic.

( via / via )

HUMUMENT album cover.

"SUN GOD (Palindrome)

In a cosmos,

Sol buoys all.

As you blossom,

so can I."

—Anthony Etherin

Exeter Moon Night Cityscape.

It's 2026, when evil really looks like evil.

Designed to obey.

( via / via )

Some great Chinese ads in English.

" 'Cthulhu' is the sound someone makes when they sneeze and try to stifle it."
—@adamroberts.bsky.social

Alloparental care.

struggle · to make · a book · come clean

to make · a book · come clean · away

a book · come clean · away · from me

come clean · away · from me · & fly

(via)

"[single person clapping]."

( via / me )

On Edward Gorey.

"Poetry begins when the dead grow tired of the facts." —@brandonshimoda

Restless Shores.

raise the red lamprey
arrive at Swerve U-Bahn
cerulean treeline
rough whispers lichgate
standing on a stern spindle
stereoblade rabies
Lemurian-laid pitfall
raise the red lamprey

"Those people are in the same landscape as the songs come out of. I feel that they understand them."

( via / via )

To the Postal Carrier, About That Railing.

"at the zero hour"

feats of memory
feats of procrastination
vulture at the table

tastes my coffee before i do

Apophatic (II).

"A Philadelphia nun named Sister Rose Kuhn drives to a Texas immigration court weekly to sit next to unaccompanied children as young as 4 who are facing deportation hearings alone without relatives or an attorney so that they won’t have to face the judge by themselves."
—@therickydavila.bsky.social via

Zombie (throat singing cover).

( via / via )

Golden Mist of Error.

"And Xibalba is packed with tests, heaps and piles of tests." —Popol Vuh (tr Tedlock, 1996)

"...some poems 'you write' and some 'you talk about in bars': 'Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it’s fatal to confuse them'."

"tiny lizard got bigger"

a clean mask & clear sailing
shelves enough & night peace
Euclid neon
Lettie Lynton dress

Sistine Chapel.

( via / via )

The Days are Coming in Abundance.

"to own the Moon"

Radon Nardo Gray
rando in the plandark
baleful bully
bellicose ape-thumb scumbles
radon cinder block
sickness builds its triumph
gold on cardboard
decaying fash ashtray
all those years of saving
& pride tossed
cesspools found voidpull
Radon Nardo Gray

Northern Elegies, V.

"Right now, all of us are living through a renaissance in animation preservation. It’s a defining part of the 21st century..." —Animation Obsessive via

"That is the epigram. Small, bred for one afternoon’s work, disproportionately forceful, socially unreliable, and useless for the long amble."

( me / via )

Because it is.

"I had never heard of Flock cameras in my goddamned life and then one day I woke up and every town council everywhere had just unhinged their jaws months back and excitedly horfed down a full surveillance state." —catvalente.bsky.social

The Shuto Expressway that appears in Tarkovsky's Solaris.

salt crystals sparkle
redgreen & clear—like a reluctance
that is also a duty

"It was his own copy. It had somehow made its way from a gypsy cab in New York all the way through various book dealers to this place in Texas and back to him."

( via / via )

"They hunted nutria, apparently, and pelts had begun appearing on doorsteps. No one could agree whether they were offerings or warnings."

"FRANKENSTEIN

Deeds, lives allay me. Man, not law, decide.
End loyal rot, civilian, as a god.
Parts mix a monster, frets no maker tied:
A menace.... Voltage, plate me; rip a rod.

Pale, soon to rot, stuck carcass, end a sleep!
Dial sun, age... beg a raven egg of doom.
Moors liven. Idle here, we rift, far creep....
I peer, craft fire. We’re held in evil’s room.

Mood: fog. Geneva. Rage began us, laid.
Peel sadness. A crack cuts to rot. Noose, lap.
Do rap ire, metal peg, at love.... Cane made,
I trek. A monster frets. No maxims trap.

'Dog!' As a nail I, Victor, lay — old need.
Iced Walton, name my all as evil’s deed!"

—Anthony Etherin

"They are intended for people who want flowers so long as they are not really flowers."

"Every one of those brave and inspiring people you hear about on the news was exhausted and terrified the whole time. They were sad and angry and wanted to crawl into a hole and not come out. They wished they could have stayed in bed. Then they did it anyway. But they did it scared and sad and tired. We also all still had to go to work. People still had to find ways to spend time with their families and take care of their children. We still had to deal with mundane bullshit. And while we did that it didn't stop. Ice was at our work places too. At kids schools, at doctors offices. It didn't stop. So fucking cold, for hours on end" —@nolas-socks.bsky.social via via @ossuary.bsky.social

Don't Speak.

( via / postcard of robert w chambers mansion )

"a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable as bronze in the sonority of its plunging ruin..."

"The last time this country experienced this level of civil unrest, the music was a whole lot better." —@bluevoter24.bsky.social

Myself the lit-talk squanders.

"A Dirge

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.

Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples’ dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying"

—Christina Rossetti via Sally Thomas

Jueju.

( via / via )

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote discovered the greenhouse effect.

"Decagon

Maybe if I could sleep, could dive
so soundly as to make the depth
unfold its silent field, the dead
would look no stranger than the live

There each would tend a plot, a stone
they burnish and dust; though none of them
would bear an epitaph or name...
only a pitch-black decagon

And hypnotised by one such grave,
maybe I’ll find its disc is no
decaying sun or pyring coal—
but the next pool that I must dive"

—Huck via

Grimshaw thread.

"Humans trying to achieve interstellar travel is like a troubled couple having a baby to save the marriage." —@wakeupangry.bsky.social

The Republic of Užupis.

( Buna Airbase via via / via )

Trading Mercator for Equal Earth.

"Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment." —Titus Groan via

Approach.

Sawtooth Mountains
at sunrise
road-pulled wheel

rainmet envoy

Water rolling in over a salt flat in Turkmenistan.

( via / me )

Study of Sorrow.

      "ODE: Mavortia"

ersatz debris, brimstone
      galloping
brougham potholes, harm sought
   again to learn
halftime hour · fob good ghost
foist this rage not grooved wheelnest
      spiracle
rennet plunge into it
   speed for the course
watching the last stars · spiral t'ward sunrise

The Goat Star.

"We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free." —Wendell Berry via

"Unconvinced by that 'the first sustained overview' claim - A Year in the Country has put out no less than eleven books on the subject, there was this effort by the splendidly named Merlin Coverley several years ago, I feel like I'm blanking on one or two other books..."

( me / via )

Didgeridoo Escargot.

"Into that house where no man went, he went
Alone; and in that house where day was night,
Midnight was like a darkness that had fingers."

—E A Robinson, Cavender's House (1929)

"The route cannot be acquired by questioning the boatmen:..."

Ties for the Homeless

SLOTH invades, odorless gas;
TIARA of turrets, owner of, missing.
EATER out of my hand, tell
ANENT these splinters, in a code i can break,
LANDS where i may hie to you…

CIRCLE i am always outside of, waxreft
ICARUS, who only asks
RAREST boon; i know you are listening there.
CREATE a pink for my thorns;
LUSTER up the matte backdrop; concatenate
ESTERS in this alembic.

MERGERS happen all the time around me &
ETERNAL bliss some of them.
REGATTA we drive in, that must mean something:
GRAVITY denied… Desires
ENTITLE, no, but it’s not as if i gave
RATTLER-warning to the world!
SLAYERS of promises, the news, & a candle

DECISIVE in flaring its
EGOMANIA, but snuffed, still smokes; Newton
COMPUTES the odds & remains
IMPOTENT to make one smile eventuate.
SAUTERNE, best i ever drank,
INTERRER among pain-memories loses–
VIENNESE waltz of pagan-
EASTERED days–& other cries taboo in these

FRATERIES, do you bring me?
REGIMENTAL productivity i thole,
AGITATIVE with hate, dear
TITANITES unseen, unfallen from the skies…
EMANATIST that i am.
RETITRATE the consequences. A stain speaks:
INITIATOR in far
EAVESTONE spark-sojourning, are you even now
SLESTERED with the task to come…?

Batrachian (with Root-Hoard).