"Yes, dear friends, I do not know what to do in order to escape from what does not exist!" —Paul Valéry via
"The music was often crude and kitsch, but intoxicating as if it were some forbidden fruit."
Hormuz hymnal · rehearse crisis
prices ratchet · prove normal
lightning bug's
time to burn now
Hormuz ferry · inchmeal otherwise
"One Foot in Eden
One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time’s handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.
Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies."
—Edwin Muir via Victoria Moul
"And then I got back to Iceland, and I went to an old bishop’s estate and there’s this beautiful chapel that’s completely wooden. So it felt like the perfect place to play the cello..." (via @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social)
"Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that."
—Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
"It does not merely write of suffering. It turns suffering into a subtle artistic structure."
"[T]he sense of myself that I’d carried in my thirties and forties—of someone who could, through my editing work and my criticism, through the exercise of my judgment and taste, bring about some change for the good in American literature and culture—maybe even its politics—was gone; even for myself, I’d abandoned whatever residual ambitions I might have had in the rat race of contemporary American authorship and literary life..." —Justin Smith-Ruiu via
No way through & no one to go there.
"chemo nobodaddy"
packed Walpurgisnocturne
picayune shtick
the walls close in wisely
wone school zone
what should count as catnip
carves larvae
annul tornado alley
knock Occam
power lines luring
lewd eye mooting
nog Walpurgisnincompoop
"In the eighties, she said, 'Goodness, you can buy a ticket to Kathmandu from Cedar Falls, Iowa'."
"What seems clearer is that the early twentieth century offered almost no language, certainly no public language, for what Eliot may have felt, and that this unnamable quality is itself part of what gives The Waste Land its peculiar anguish: the sense of a desolation that cannot be located, a grief without a permissible object." —Jonathan Bate via
"stainless steel sink slightly beaded"
dag spoken in darkness
adapted eye rhapsode
night that sweeps its swart tide
sweltering felt
branch of the watch-winter
aware gnomic moments
dealing out darb labels
adroit toitbox
to split meted splinters
spliff piffles
as eyeshine loses ashfight
early in the furlgame
& crumb rumors
rumble at hoard-borders
"I lack enthusiasm for haiku, so when I compose them occasionally out of obligation, I cannot go beyond the eighteenth century. Sometimes, in the afternoon, I compose one seven-character regulated verse. I find it quite interesting, and I am quite proud of it. I am happy when it is completed." —Soseki via
I feel more fado every day.
"Cento: Poem about My Father
The trees rise from the darkness of the world
in this, my last poem about my father.
To hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him.
He told where all the running water goes,
and now he’s dead.
Everything’s mine but just on loan,
time and the bell have buried the day,
the round sky goes on minding its business.
I turned and looked the other way:
sorrow’s springs are the same.
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful,
no one arrives without leaving soon.
There was nowhere at all to go."
—Steve Nickman via
"Is Tokyo as filmed by Sofia Coppola actually real?"
“Elegy for E.A. Robinson
Six months and still your parents couldn’t name
the boy they wished a girl. They let a crowd
of tipsy cooers at their resort pluck
Edwin from a hat. Of course you earned your Bs
at Harvard, left with no degree, and failed
to woo your brother’s fiancée–most lives
can spot themselves in butcher apron stains.
Half of what you penned sad Robinson
just plods, and half of that runs too long. And yet
on nights when gloom, no maudlin thing, knifes through
these rooms like news a fevered child has died
I rouse your spine to ask what might be done.
Down rows of tombs in Tilbury Town you hum
at empty plots, a spade in either palm.”
—Adam Tavel
"Their nearest competitors are Kim Jong-un and his daughter Kim Ju Ae, approximately 13, who have been making a strong showing on the world stage — she having recently been photographed driving a tank and firing a sniper rifle, which the judges acknowledge is technically impressive, though they note she bears an unsettling resemblance to the murderous animatronic doll from Squid Game and that this is affecting their ability to score objectively." —Linda Unternahrer via via @iwinter
Riding along with a whole bunch of freshly rescued food.
"Surely it would be better if our form of life more reliably rewarded virtue, but when it comes to ethical life, facing hard choices between the dear self’s preferences and the sacrifices entailed by doing the right thing is, as they say, a feature not a bug." —Anastasia Berg via
dawn hircine, thrumming
mummer's tale
regalia mourn
lids fit both · magistry boojum
trees upside down in the soft rain
"loaves made from the seed corn"
intelligent gasbag
invisible iceberg
your reason is hogtied
you lose in the short game
bleed out on the asphault
announcing the ceasefire
this song is a cold case
you munch on · thick parchment
blind swallower · among swift thoughts
creep across · layered borders
gain little · of what's lugged away
leave but gaps · & hopeless questions
"Every time I see someone talk about Claude I think about how they switched from female to male names as soon as they wanted the robots to seem like experts vs personal assistants."
—@rockshrimp.bsky.social
"What would ‘Reversed thunder’ sound like?"
I used to have a history of American literature from 1901. Melville's only mentioned in one sentence--& they misspelled his name.
Garblehome, thin hamster
herald of instar questions
bluebonnets
between blank lanes
Lysenko smiles · small flutterings
I Return to Vinyl after 34 Years.
the fall is not so far
though shadows stand
as they were wont before
the fall is not so far
shall all this meet the fire
or will it twist instead
the fall is not so far
though shadows stand
"This art was never about bloodless spirituality, still less about mere patriotism."
"dudes in Silicon Valley should take a couple years off and just focus on making printers work"
—@brinleymcculley
It’s not demonization if they’re truly demonic.
"These paintings are glimpses of the future, pledges of what is yet to come, summons to an unnamed country we only see here in passing." —Matthew J Milliner via
"pine smell waft"
graygreen fading to dawn horizon Matterhorn
to find the tune that lets me live
"kite lego"
there ought to be some weird weather
includes delight for tired troupers
a tadpole on the hard sidewalk
a reader of despised scriptures
this pilgrim goes where maze narrows
without design & nil output
knowing the tale of shape shifter
& draped with cobweb orb crystal
here for a few more mild pun-quips
as sky eclipse turns blood portent
The abjection of never being able to finish, always interrupted, continually refused any palpable closure: this as a place, a condition we are in. To find a way to inhabit it--as nomads. Haunters of the flicker-light.
Instructions for Having a Soul.
The arts of fascination—can & will be automated; the arts of deliverance—never.
Commodities are fetishized throughout history and become the objects of profound myths.
"dome builded of halvah"
through Protean twistings
thin Mini Cooper
may or may not rain
still-running pillbug
word upon word arduous
wends like scorch tinchel
headlights on in daytime
under a guessed twister
would be mud brillig
brutal castoff soot flake
The greatest silent movie ever made.
"bread in payment"
ducks with prophetic powers
paddle across turquoise
circles expand spoiling
my dark-spawned poem
it's not over till it's over
Knott's collected "Chanson d'Automne" versions. (pdf)
"Per-capita energy consumption has risen from about two thousand kilocalories a day in the palaeolithic, all of it food, to two hundred and thirty thousand in the modern United States." —Aneesh Sathe via
On some words of the Georgics.
"Essays on this topic are collected in the astonishing anthology Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience in which anthropologists struggle to come to terms with experiences they had in the field which align with their hosts’ world view, but not their own." —Gnostic Pulp via
"It's as if the writer refused to do the choosing between background and foreground..."
"Soft City
Bread and breadknife, like the best of friends,
Nap in the night kitchen, and neither see
Snow taking the city by storm.
The flakes fill the sky, falling soft
Like the crumbs coming off a cut loaf.
The houses, having no home to run to,
No space where snow has not spread,
Must stand sentry as the flakes spin down.
And if some tidy-minded titan
Decided to sweep the whole street up,
The crumbs and buildings, the cars and bushes,
All so like dust, into his outsized dustpan,
Who would be any the wiser?"
—Jonathan Roper at FGR
"THE CHRYSALIS (Anagrammed Lines)
A shy echo splinters
those shiny parcels.
The chrysalis opens
physical otherness...."
—Anthony Etherin
"Because we are all susceptible to this kind of literally irrational yet ethical turn of mind, we do the same with art. We want to dance to music that doesn’t make us feel morally compromised."
—Daniel Moran via
"strychnine beats"
dénouement remaining
amerceproof tortsufi
the box babbles glibly
with a barded-wire marplot
too close to the claw-swing
declining pile dial tones
scrabble of waves scraping
screwball danse macabre
The Medieval Irish Law of Cats.
"In darkness by day we must press on,
giddy at the tilt of a negative crystal."
—J H Prynne via
"Around 1820, his followers built a labyrinth with a small shrine at its center; they used it to meditate on the many false paths the soul would face before the coming of the millennium... the labyrinth was neglected until 1939, when a local preservation society built a new one. One of the first people to visit the new maze was the Indiana poet Marguerite Young..." —Ryan Ruby via
"left & right not interchangeable"
something that hurts · something that doesn't hurt
enough about the cultural
wombat. it will always · wear gray
double espresso bolsters
your rigamarole · of rude answer-jabs
the sky is threatening
but threatening what?
"April's Blister
Shroud-dried April’s frigid toes are dangling from the lair,
of the charnel house’s tower, deviant arsenic sun seeps in my skin;
neighbourhood couple jesting like rancid pieces of marzipan.
horribly peerless, so hurry-
violently stuff yourself with air, neatly clutch your eyeballs,
arrange them in pinholes, lest-
tenant-less cobwebs are already settling on ink;
this ceiling blazing in a monotone
fizz, holds a rusty fall which withers
down the lake of daffodils.
Peeling off my kip, a bubble wrap sprouting blood, ants
dutifully build borders and walls on white blisters, curses
on the wall shimmer in bright light; churning
out corpses- like an accident
prone area. a stale evening washes
you over like rotten bandages. dirt shovelled
with fingernails in twain; brittle, and tied
with lovers lint. Wracking dirt for an
aeon’s necropolis, my bones cave in -
weather dolls of ash, crumbling
in acrid April rain. I munch down bricks in the catacombs
of defiance of desiderating.
The floor whimpers itself white, lying under
chandeliers that loosely hang half-awake.
Still complaining about the weather, my-
plaster saint for gloom, my face scribbled over
in the posters. I’ll label the street lights huge, my
bed-sheet is the ghost. Dreams that i never had
hang from its crevices, loose skin flaps
softened by tides. The ocean is an open wound, moon has a habit
of poking it. it dutifully delivers corpses, payback; hope
is an hourglass filled with quicksand; a four lettered blister
I etched with tongs on my skin. Where are the feathers?"
—@erratumaddendum
"History is basically one long record scratch of men saying, 'I’m just saying,' and then building a legal system around it." —Professor Meredith via
Instructions in an Emergency Room.
"Kitëzh weathered"
car shroud thesterness
coral neon
the air not cleared
a few notes
like last rain drops
creak & rattle of birds
"...Sergei Khoruzhii, something of a Renaissance man among whose quite unbelievable achievements is translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Russian." —Victoria Stoilova via
Daughter, your frontier is the brutal jut and dint of their conditioning.
On the E at Delphi. (Along with citing modern attempts at interpretation.)
“I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons,–with gestures and with attitudes and with wholly charming phrases; with tears, and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of all lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart’s desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the might of my own folly.” —The Way of Ecben
"double helixir"
Father of Lies · life's blood
on the red
rustling carpet
corridors stab starboard
scheme remnants my hymnal
bogus sward · bound for decay
just weary
aware morning
jinx agenda manxome
the mire country chyron
what the storm
richly installed
eyes still dark with irkthwart
"For years after I would wake shrieking."
"Góngora: De la brevedad engañosa de la Vida
No less than the swift arrow solicited
a mark sharply destined to be bitten,
nor with more silence than the agonistic chariot
glided across mute sands to a winning finish,
does our century run to its prompt, secret end. Who doubts,
though he be beast destitute of reason,
yet may he read the portent of every dawn.
Carthage testifies, & still you don’t admit it?
You’ll run into trouble, Licio, if you persist
in chasing phantoms & embracing frauds…
Badly the hours’ll account you to yourself:
the hoürs that are grinding down the days,
the days that are gnawing away the years."
(my translation)
"This site is making me think Plato was right about banning poets from the republic"
—@jordandavis3
The poetry of the pseudoscience of poetry.
"To the moneyed amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the twentieth century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret) the study of literature was 'a glory of the universe' or 'the spring which unlocks the hidden life'." —James Marriott via
"Eyes filled with wonder, she went home and changed her baby’s Vietnamese name to an American one."
"How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light"
—Gary Snyder via
