( via / via )

"There’s very little money in actually selling product."

"And the citizens, denied every word, invented an animal: the grass mud horse, a noble mythical alpaca whose name in Mandarin is a perfect homophone for 'fuck your mother,' which spawned songs, plush toys, nature documentaries about its battle with the river crab (homophone: 'harmony,' the official euphemism for censorship). The people built a fake zoology with one entry just to say the sentence on the parchment. The state banned the alpaca." —@terminallydrifting via

"The civilisation that could have given rise to an American Homer was wiped out when the settlers arrived."

"Sisson is very good on how the making of a translation is the most attentive kind of reading one can do; but that most fully successful importations of a style or tone or form from one language to another are found not in translations themselves, but in imitations of various kinds, even if their success is rooted in the practice of translation."

( via via / via )

"Becoming a skilled and rigorous reader is a life’s work, informed by one’s own reading and experience, by the example of others, and by one’s character."

      "beautiful wrecked slalom"

legended · narrow stairway
      we crept up
   to my black sheets
fremd festival hosting
fastness holy pastime

scroll forward · a Saturn streel
      what's this land
   whelming toxic
steeple sealed with plywood
Plimsoll at skull ullage

ultracrepidarian bard
      wends his way
   to a black cup

The Scent of New-Mown Mayhem.

Oldsters who want physical media are like the last underground.

Going to California.

( via / via )

Commentary on Dictée.

This is a record i had to listen to over & over, with dawning recognition of its beauty & power. At first, i didn't even like it (& i listen to a lot of way-out stuff). I would say, a lot of free jazz depends on momentarily creating cadences which are played with & then mutated--or discarded--& it's not that hard for a practiced listener to recognize them in real-time. But with this record, Coltrane is not working with cadences but with textures & clashes of textures. He's utilizing implications & absences, & it's the knowledge of his deep foundation that is what grows on you with every further listen. Poets who are wedded to the unspeakable are occasionally allowed a place in poetry, painters make a fetish of their love of mysteriousness, but musicians who go to the same place only get a sad, knowing smile from "musician's musicians" because if this is also music, everything they've spent a lifetime learning is—wrong. via

Writing Self Writing Nation.

      "Gregg"

Mallalieu y l'Age d'Or
malfunctioning garage door
      tramped down path
   to the blue pool
absent · its sometime guests
watching the world · wake up from history
      watching out
   days of Hormuz
& mine sweeper grim

Previously Unpublished Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

( via )

"Who are the great divagators of literature?"

   woodsmoke & dovesong
Venus & Jupiter vie
   step high in grass lush

Computer Hacking Documentries Mega Collection.

"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."

~ Hermann Hesse via @poeticoutlaws

Journacide.

( via / via )

Maska.

"Like building a maze as you go while at the same time getting lost in it."
—@jacobwren.bsky.social

"I had thought myself frail..."

      "wizardly impetus"

between dog & · wolf, twining
thread of light · alone where
      fluorescents
   softly bicker
passage to put back things

perishing thesh hour
static as the stone · on your own grave
      did you think
   the world would not
dodder on, amsace

between dog & wolf

"Over the last years, the annual festival in Kortrijk has become a real-life meeting hub for an otherwise decentralized online community."

( via / via )

"This was the console where, for 40 years, hundreds of thousands of slips of paper had been inserted into cardboard cylinders then sent up or down in pneumatic copper tubes in the stacks, 17 floors at its peak."

   clearer the garble
pages whose reason has fled

   button on the wall
& a code to keep up with

the cough no named intruder

The church will be finished in 2034.

"In 1950s Tokyo, an imported jazz LP cost 3,000 yen at a time when the average monthly office salary was 20,000 yen. The jazz kissaten was the solution to that arithmetic.

Japan's jazz kissa trace back to a single establishment: Black Bird, which opened near Tokyo University in 1929, playing Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on an Electrola phonograph for students who had no other way to hear American jazz. By the mid-1970s, roughly 200 kissaten operated in Tokyo alone and around 600 across Japan. The typical room is dim and compact, stacked with vintage American audio equipment: Altec speakers, McIntosh amplifiers, Thorens turntables. More than 90 percent of these establishments still play vinyl.

The defining practice was silence."

—Michael Daniels via

"...in a single moment, diffused, profuse, complete and distant..."

( via / via )

Saints and Liars.

"Backrooms is basically what if Microsoft Teams was a real place" —@vasairena

"Substack being a platform combining in many ways the truest essence of Twitter and a substitute teachers’ break-room, the Cash Conspiracy took flight."

streels breakable calcspar
among coal black speed bumps
the road never gets nicer

connectivity snivels

"A niche writer may be as strange and as difficult as a cult writer, but they still tend to enjoy the comforts of civilisation, with its libraries and its dry cleaners and its peacock-shaped coat hooks in the toilets."

( via / via )

The Daphne du Maurier Short Story Scale.

   idol armor
thick clouds & lit foreground
lost in the spaces between

fresh breeze in the scrappy lane
mild-named season of rigors

"There is something futile in undertakings such as Picasso's Guernica..."

"Part of what Dead Mall Press is trying to do is tap into some of the qualities of the mimeograph era of approx. 1965-1985, which was a stripped down, DIY form of poetry publishing that existed among relatively underground poets. This era marked a time before non-profits, grad programs, and computers/internet changed everything." —RM Haines via

"Southeast Asia, the site of his trauma, also gave him the tools that he needed to recover from it."

( via / via )

Throbbing rectangle.

"The interiority bias, as is spelt in Jungian circles today, doesn’t as much belong to Jung as it belongs to Jungians - gazing inwards into the discipline that is more in love with the walls of its vessel than its content, processes and development." —Gabriela Sova Spulirova via

"He found that flow requires one specific thing: a challenge that matches your skill level."

"full fridge"

equilibrium lobbied
lab of worthwhile scarlets
book of primes pillaged
for Porlock oracles

crunk in the capitol

Kudzu in infrared.

( via / via )

"Spying an obtuse looking plastic media contraption emblazoned with the promotional artwork of a film referenced by a bunch of TV shows and suddenly feeling nostalgia for a time that you were never actually alive to witness."

noclip smirr smackdown
kismet early evening
substrate. Little Rome
after Olive Garden
      rescue dog
   of a derne yard
the sky full of portents · & pale steeds

The only way to read it, with those covers & some dirt weed.

"Theory: vinyl made a come back because Ikeas Kallax storage units fit vinyl records perfectly."
—@pauljholden.com

Ringsend.

( via / me )

Owl Impersonator.

Confirmed woolgatherer here. I can waste four hours without half trying.

"And they say perfect criticism doesn’t exist."

"Sonnet Addressed to George Oppen, Arlington National Cemetery

I think of the dead, the disposition of
the grave, the marble here arrayed. I’ve found
my words to be but parodies of sound
or parodies of silence, and (above
all else, perhaps) mere parodies of love.
The ‘heartlessness’ of words, you wrote (you, bound,
as I), lies in their opacity. We sound
their depths—the force of clarity, a cove-
nant. Over by the Mall, the cherry trees
are finishing their dance, and the monuments
are softened by the scent of fading blooms.
Our wounded earth is flooded with a sea
of petals that flick and flutter as they’re spent.
Her broad back bends beneath their soft perfume."

—Eric Racher in Plough

Sharp dressed men.

( via / via [couldn't find a good pic of the richardson store] )

View from China Beach.

"stark wind of divestiture"

barricade of coral
cadence in small follies
my go-path ungathered
ganch of empty hallways

did i read to the end

The Jewel.

Antonioni was liminal before Liminal was Liminal.

Night Walking.

( via / via )

"My advisor mentioned casually, that we would have to purchase reprints of our own papers if we wanted copies available to mail out when requests came in.."

The only loser they have any use for is Robert E. Lee.

"... the vulgarity that is the hallmark of Trump and his surrounding circle of oligarchs is a symptom of something not at all trivial: The collapse of social norms."

"canned cocktail"

speltered Bialetti
Counter Reformation
Segway down Biscayne sidewalk

ascend pylons sandaled
vertigo gaunt featured
gorge crossed by a motorbike

tourbillon speed bumps

A Forgotten Myth.

( via / via )

"It matters who owns the ground on which we build, how the rules of the game are structured, and that we remember there are other games we can play together, less destructive and all-consuming than the winner-takes-all nightmare that has been presented as reality itself around here lately."

"The Timberstacks

They have such character—they are unlike
the mounds of raw materials you find
in quarries, construction sites—for the timberstacks
were once alive.

Today they mount each other’s pyres; tonight
their silhouettes
blazing through dusk…

Their rough-hewn pyramids
shoulder the glyphs with which they speak to me—
though what is it they say?

Of all the fates they couldn’t understand,
in this at least they find
themselves so closely packed,
more closely packed than in the deepest jungle;
and they need only whisper
to each other.

But what is it they say?"

—Huck via

Crystallize.

"What the classical writers were doing is what we have largely lost. They were not 'tolerating' tsuyu. They were not 'waiting it out.' They were treating the season as a guest in the room, with its own habits, and behaving accordingly." —Tōan via

"And with every step one takes, every corner turned and door stepped through, one gets farther from a way out, risking getting lost and becoming an unwilling inhabitant of a space impossible to inhabit."

( via / via )

If u think abt it 'The Yellow Wallpaper' was kind of the first entry in the Backrooms universe.

"Detail a terror retaliated." —Anthony Etherin

"Today’s upper and middle class have willingly chosen to conduct much if not all of their monetary and social commerce in this virtual environment. This can be understood as people adopting cartoon identities, and living part of their lives in a cartoon world."

in cheese coma, in chemtrails
feral karaoke
      back to some
   semblance of grid
the napkins creased · regions crosshatched

have not missed much of
militeledildonics
      bullet holes in
   high ancient walls
somewhere whited by · whilom bomb dust

library books buried

Gertrude Stein.

( via / via )

The wealthiest one percent are now responsible for more deaths than all geological hazards combined.

"siege by all candies"

whirlwind tardy tolling
we tell ourselves fables
thick heat among threatshapes
authorship conniption

go as we had giddy
nor Gehenna fended

The Stolen Child.

"poem is a tool for finding out, not a vessel to fill with the known" —@eireannmor.bsky.social via

The Man Who Mastered Time.

( via / via )

A gothic, dieselpunk spectacle.

"I saw both the AIDS documentary We Were Here and the feature film Milk (about assassinated gay rights leader Harvey Milk) in the Castro, films in which the theater itself appears, and to be inside a theater that is inside the movie you are watching is a wonderful Moebius strip-Russian doll of an experience. " —Rebecca Solnit via

Importunate Void.

"the building, barking & biting book"

the ghostly dryght · drizzles in subfusc
places once · a plan might have tarried
meanwhile mannikins · mightily arrayed
in the sky scrollop · redshift & shuffled off

Double tanka.

( via / me )

It's Complicated.

"The Sublime

To stand upon a windy pinnacle,
Beneath the infinite blue of the blue noon,
And underfoot a valley terrible
As that dim gulf, where sense and being swoon
When the soul parts; a giant valley strewn
With giant rocks; asleep, and vast, and still,
And far away. The torrent, which has hewn
His pathway through the entrails of the hill,
Now crawls along the bottom and anon
Lifts up his voice, a muffled tremulous roar,
Borne on the wind an instant, and then gone
Back to the caverns of the middle air;
A voice as of a nation overthrown
With beat of drums, when hosts have marched to war."

—W S Blunt

Eventide.

“Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.” —Loren Eiseley

"Let’s not get forced into the mirrored casket of greatness."

( via / via )

"They laugh at the right moments..."

"Taking in Masonic lore, peculiar hidden pubs, the drab prosaic horror of new build suburbs, trees that evoke dread and wonder; crumbling churches and the food, drink and cultural morays of lesser travelled Holloway backstreets (he has a real thing for Holloway and Camden Town), The London Adventure is also a (perhaps, the) foundational work of early psychogeography, less working guidebook in the mode of, say, The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher (1962) or Len Deighton’s London Dossier (1967) and more akin to the playful, verbose, cog twisting world of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) (and on which Machen’s London Adventure was a firm influence)." —Harry Sword via

Nichols Canyon.

"stormaganza"

on the dwaleroad Macbethish
benthic spiralling keelhaul
cafe au lait fine constant
affordances arm's tie-off
consolationmaxxing
car flying flags

Walk Like an Egyptian.

( via / via )

"The paradox of artistic creation, always both transgressively reactive to, and proactively prior to, time."

"dwalm psalmody"

diaphanous grade grubbing
grown under umber floors
true color trickster
Tralfamadore mooring
hawseholes of wayback

capybara werewolf
firewall & crawl highwire
this space never spanned yet
bespoke wheel of newsreels
hawseholes of wayback

Minty fresh.

"Two decades later in 1971, when Caedmon Records was sold to the Raytheon Corporation, you could tell that the light was failing already for American literary LPs." —Paddy Bullard via

"And then went down to the ship..."

( via real japanese aesthetics / via )

"What was once called 'the lost decade' became 'the lost two decades,' then 'the lost three decades.' It has become the dimness we live under."

"Most of that was wasted effort. We taught about tools that disappeared within a few scant years. We provided FAQs for platforms that were merged, bought out, enfolded, obviated, obliterated. We evangelized, however skeptically, about techniques and technologies that we thought had potential, that we thought could serve as an alternative to dominant corporate bloatware, that we felt were the next new thing or were the new enduring standard. Much of the time, we were wrong. Even when we were right about the possibilities, we were wrong." —Timothy Burke via

Visit.

"perfect future"

outfoxed the slavering wolves
of the Lord's cerulean

kilnfaced intricate waves
outfoxed the slavering wolves

abandoned at final wharves
forsaken by heroin

outfoxed the slavering wolves
of the Lord's cerulean

I Remember Poetry.

( via / via )

The forest will eat us all in the end.

"The Sun Over Athens

A broad bight and a bonny city,
streets and smoke and the sea curving,
a deed dreams over downcast houses,
a stroke sings about speltered gables,
a sword sighs about splintered doorposts;
the guns gaze and gant, thinking,
the night nods in the narrow corners,
the dark dwalms on the droning crannies,
the guns gaze together watching.

The streets stir and the stones are warming,
the houses can hear the hidden warning,
the guns gaze together watching.

The sun streams from the sky above them,
a hot hammer, higher than shrillness,
a slight stroke, a strait piercing,
sheer shining, shafts and standing,
sure shafts, a sheer hammer.
Good ground and gleaming water
for an era's anchors, ancient shelter,
room for riding and right water
for an era's anchors, an ancient roadstead,
for an era's anchors, ancient haven
for an era's anchors, war wanes in it
and wheels elsewhere to whip the water.

A lee and a long one, and a long story
looming along it, learning and battles,
through change unchanging, chains go roaring
link and link, linger and tauten,
howl through hawseholes in history's shelter,
hurry through hawseholes in history's roadstead.
Drab drift from them as they drag the water,
ships and sheer to their sheering anchors,
grey like gulleys over grey water.
Arrayed like the rocks in ranging colours,
the colour of coastlines creeping by them,
grasp the ground and give to leeward.

Strewn like the stones on the stern horizon,
strewn like stones on the stern horizon.
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? southward.
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? southward.
The sun stands in the sky above them--
history's hill and high marble,
scree and stones and scarred ridges,
highland, haven, headland, island,
a bright and brightness and broad curving.

Oil and island, and old fathoms,
oil in isles, an old harbour,
islands, oars, an old haven.
Hymettus here, Hymettus eastward,
Hymettus hiding hollow and upland,
Salamis seaward, Salamis yonder,
Salamis stretched in a smirr from the water;
straying stour, the smoking Piraeus,
rough with rubble, rienged by blasting,
a dark door to undeafened ages,
soundless strokes the sun hammers.

The sun strides, the sun goes westward,
the sun stands, the sun goes westward,
the sun circles, the sun goes westward;
ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and pillars between them,
Attica, Attica, Attica, rounded.
Hymettus, Hymettus, Hymettus eastward.
The sun circles, the sun goes westward.

The streets are stirring, the stones grow warmer;
the houses can hear the hidden warning;
the guns gaze together watching;
the batteries breathe the breath around them,
from bomb and blast, blare and screaming,
shock and shaking, shackled roaring,
tearing and tracer, tracks and curving,
sky and scarlet, skirting and climbing,
night and nothing, night and concussion,
roaring, recoil, rending and fuming.
The guns gaze together watching.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and the pillars between them;
history's harbour, history's fathoms.
War watches and wanes above them
war waits and wanes around them
war waits and watches near them.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
plain and port and pillars between them;
a lee for learning, a long story,
a long lee, a low island.

Ancient anchor for ages' thinking,
the guns gaze together watching.
The sun stands, the sun goes westward.
War wavers and watches in it.

A sword swaivers that swept in the darkness;
the houses can hear the hidden warning,
the guns gaze together watching.
Link and link linger and tauten,
chains in the channels of churning hawseholes,
drab like doom drift to leeward,
hulls and heel as they hear their anchors,
ships and sheer to their sheering anchors,
strife and steering, stream and hazes,
seas and steering, steering and heeding,
trails and tracks, tracer, skylines,
wakes and watching, wan mantles,
smoke in a smirr, smoke in a mantle,
wavering in wisps, wandering outward,

Ancient haven, history's harbour.
History's hill and high marble,
plain and port and pillars between them,
a broad bight, a barren hillside,
a broad bight and a bonny city;
streets and smoke and the sea curving.

—George Campbell Hay

While Reading Lucille Clifton.

"Nothing says 'dying civilization' like gladiator fights at the capitol for the emperor’s amusement." —@detroitbreakdown.bsky.social

Hay: "What Song is Ours".

( via / via )

"What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved."

"During the dictatorship, record companies or musicians had to submit every song that they were doing to the government censors to be approved. So to get around that censorship, they would use homophones. There’s a really well known song by Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil called ‘Cálice’ which, written down, is the word for ‘chalice’, but spoken it sounds exactly the same as ‘shut your mouth’ or ‘shut up, keep your mouth closed’. But no, it’s pretending to be a song about a chalice!" —Zoë Perry via

" Every one of them asked me to do the same thing: keep them anonymous, and don’t let this go quiet."

"the gift"

a sky-god land-drawn giant cat
discovered for the world anew
becomes a meme though clue escapes
unriddling for these toxic apes
bitterly i among them marooned

a shipwrecked sailor’s message left
for saucer cats should they return
who once had sense to spurn the joint
seeing its prizes disappoint
bitterly i among them marooned

From our porch to yours.

( via / via )

"The image is based on a pun: the Greek for 'wax,' kērós, is phonologically similar to kēr (chest), which in pre-literate Greece, was regarded as the repository of sense impressions, memory and understanding. Socrates, of course, is waxing philosophical here."

screwworm wormwood loyal
wilderness of cesspools
throatvise easing · cerulean
   books i barely remember
diamond in the flesh weeping · wilderness
under ruined fluorescents

"When many varied things are deemed beautiful, some championed widely, others deeply appreciated by a handful of devotees, some rising through the layers of time to be reconsidered beautiful, others deemed harmful falling away, then I feel the pivot of ‘what behaviour is this causing?’ can allow a fluid, see-sawing of effects, none going too far."

"They are not mirrors reflecting reality without distortion but maps whose usefulness lies in what they preserve and what they ignore. Science advances not by escaping analogy but by refining it: not certainty replacing metaphor, but better metaphors replacing worse ones." —Aran Canes via

"At 11, following her mother’s suicide, she’d resolved never to talk again – a stricture she (mostly) observed, she claimed, into her twenties. 'They used to think I was crazy,’ she later said.."

( via / via )

"We went every day about nine o’clock, with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them."

"Elias Thorne might be a clockmaker, a lighthouse keeper, or a librarian. But if you ask ChatGPT or any of the other popular large language models to tell you a story, there’s a good chance he’ll appear, unbidden." —Samantha Cole via

Certain Flowers.

"CASSEROLE (Anagrammed Lines)

The perfect casserole:
Cereal of the spectres.
Ether of secret places."

—Anthony Etherin

"But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is'“a frying pan full of diamonds' and 'humorous like a crotch sparkle.' It is 'like lickable mink'..."