( via / me )

Down the rabbit hole with Namaskar.

"Riddle 2 from the Exeter Book

I move at times beyond mortal ken:
under the eddies’ shock earthward I delve
Barbwielder's bath; Abyss regurges
spindrift and spray, spume-beweltered;
whalemere howling, harshly growling;
staiths streambeaten, strom wallowing
on steep skerries —stones and shingle,
wrack and jetsam— wrestling, I,
floodpower-enfolded, founder dredging
wide wavebedrock. Waterhelm cannot
be loosed till leave from the leader who pilots
my sea-soundings. Say, thoughtful man,
who breaks me from embrace of briny fathoms
when heaving surges hush to stillness;
the wake becalmed that covered me once?"

--Rahul Gupta on Academia.edu

Mirkwood.

"the fish doorbell"

squiring the fish doorbell
i'm turned away haywire
just bubbles & ebon
shadow figures gadding

no button-girt portal
crowned the ebbing webpage
nine hundreds a gander
online fondly seeking

Reading by the seashore.

( via / via )

Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic.

"THE STELAE
for Arnold Rich

Last night I met you in my sister's house
risen from the dead
showing me your collection

You are almost at the point of giving things away

It's the stelae on the walls I want
that I never saw before

You offer other objects
I have seen time and time again

I think you think you are giving me
something precious

The stelae are so unlike you
swart, indifferent, incised with signs
you have never deciphered

I never knew you had them
I wonder if you are giving them away"

--Adrienne Rich

The Fish Doorbell.

"ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?"

By American poet, Adelaide Crapsey (September 9, 1878-October 8, 1914) via @heather_nanni

War story.

( via / via )

"So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come."

They had an instant coffee machine on campus which poured first concentrate then hot water. I learned to pull out the cup before the water started, pay for another, & swap the empty cup for my half filled cup of concentrate. That's how i got through college.

And a day goes by.

"lex talionis"

unhoused harrowing · here deposited
a flake · flogging the flower war
our unwearying words · secondhand witness
& we snipe at each other · too snugly urned
though we can drive & drug · drizzlethrough
no comfort comes · caring too much
& not enough

"Immanentize the Eschaton" in Claude 3's output--or is it? Who can say?

( via / via )

Bemaya.

"7/26/68: III

So many minds in search of bodies
groping their way among artificial limbs.

Of late they write me how they are getting on:
desertion, desertion, is the story of those pages.

A chewed-up nail, the past, splitting yet growing,
the same and not the same; a nervous habit never shaken.

Those stays of tooled whalebone in the Salem museum--
erotic scrimshaw, practical even in lust.

Whoever thought of inserting a ship in a bottle?
Long weeks without women do this to a man."

--Adrienne Rich, Leaflets

"Dagger Dagger" & "Feed the Dream" live.

As epigraph for one of my early books, i translated Horace's "damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae" [Odes 4.7] as: 'The swift heavens, nevertheless, repair/ all the depredations of the Moon.' (1993)

I Got Heaven.

( via / via )

Farewell.

"In the apocalyptic climate of the 1940's Robert Lowell became the leading poet of his generation. He wrote as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought to be perpetuated." --F W Depee

The Missing Nymph.

"portal"

cold adorned by the dawn chorus
the world not wearied · of music or war
my wheels glide · in the kiteslipt gloaming

The Scent of Time.

( via hybridizer / via )

"...these metal men don’t need a vehicle to navigate the city anymore, they are the vehicles themselves."

"The Time Beneath

In the premortury tomb
Of ancient time--
Who does not lie there,
A mummy not yet born?
Who does not lie there,
Who lives?
Except mock-creatures in wild numbers
The upper air usurping
While the great dead still sleep?

But when the great dead at last live,
What are those deep worlds then?
When beauty rises from the blackened queens
And the lachrymatory vessels sparkle
With tears from unbound eyes
That grieve sincerely how they lay
Long closed?

They are the pit of future then,
Where cautious souls that never risked name
Lie down in ghastly triumph of will
And dream of grandeur never lost
To the ancient test of death."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

I want to make images that fight your eye a little.

"Gothic word of the day:
Gaqumþs ('assembly, coming together [of people]')" --@OleWikander

The Early Bird.

( via / via )

Wordmelum.

"sad to see these poor dudes muttering about pronouns and wokeness like a Japanese soldier still fighting WWII in the 80s" --@RichDecibels

"The strike and slow which clast did broil..."

"wingman on Titan"

scorpion's scamper · askew with ring
of feculent fire · our feud & muddle
cannot save ourselves · cannot say what it is
makes us so crazy · & mindlessly cruel
vantablack lodge venom · vap of worlds

Song.

( me / via )

"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."

"The Howling of Wolves

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a violin, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running—brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks."

--Ted Hughes

Maggot Brain.

"Literature isn't sacred. It's a failure. Defeat. It's not a drawing made by language. Not even misery painted by language. Only that despair gives birth to technique. Despair invents ventriloquy."

– Kim Hyesoon, Bird Rider: An Essay (trans. Don Mee Choi) via @svedberg_alex

Terebellum.

( via / me )

"...the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry." (via Mefi)

"...pert quicksilver
His gaze begets, goblin mineral..."

--CS Lewis

The bizarre time are coming.

"Single Traveller

What is this love that is my life's companion?
Shape-changer, sometimes faceless, this companion.

Single traveller, I wander a wasting world
awaiting the much anticipated Companion.

A trillium covered wood one April day
served as a nearly consummate companion.

A horse, two dogs, some cats, a blue macaw
each in its turn became a loyal companion.

Behind the loved embrace, a face of light-
demon or angel-lures me from my companion.

The street of love is neither wide nor narrow.
Its width depends on me and my companion.

Am I too bound and blinded by coarse wrappings
ever to know true love as my companion?

O Poet, squanderer of time and talents
why do you search for love as your Companion?"

--P K Page

Quiet moment.

( via / via )

Gathering Storm over Farm.

"big new feelings"

borne on Xibalba- · burnished skies
screamriddle scram · scrunched up
witness who'd wear · winter camo
in the spring spraintcrop · sprawling demonolatry
with shiny new smiles

"All thought that lasts is contradiction."

"In the year of my youth when yoyos came in
The carriage was sunny and the Clyde was bright
As I hastened from Helensburgh in the height of summer
Leaving for home in a lounge suit.
Sombre were the sixteen skies of Europe,
The stokers were seasick on the ship of state
For the decks were dipping though McDonald was steering.
...
I sat in my still corner while the country ran
Listening to the lulling low of the lines,
And a shadow-train flitted foreshortened through fields
Of the English counties one after another
Day wore on. I dozed and dreamed."

--W H Auden (qtd in Phelpstead)

Necessary Evil.

( still from Kwaidan / via )

Game of Life in 3D.

"They talked of technicalities, the terms of their art,
The rules of englyns, and of runic riddles.
They were aware of words, and as if unaware
Of the battle that rolled and rattled beneath them..."

--Artorius

The Carnegie Hall Concert.

"eclipsedust manifesto"

any illness · errand-ghost listing
the difficult delvers · in dark rooms wait
i was wrong to reck you · a mere riddle
you are canvas & stretcher · corner & streetlight

"I'm going into the park to do pastoral dances."

( still from Kwaidan / via )

Some history of Tinariwen.

"Oil Refinery

Under the fume · of the first dragons
those spellbinders who guard · goldhoards under barrows
whole fields of warriors · wilted: even Beowulf
fell in balebreath · from firedrake fangs

Yet this hugest of Worms · though he outburst heaving
from deepest of meres · under farthest moor
is led leaping and leaping ·at last to these shores
and hour by hour · overhewn and whelmed

Not without fury resists · flames in the night
blasts the world air · wans all blue day
Ho! a handful of thanes · in helmets threaten him
in silver keeps stab him · the old swartshiner
with gauges bedevil · with dials with cyclonesnuffers
endless they slaughter · that slimiest of Nadders

Hwaet! he is quick again · thousand-toothed Queller
whirls his ghost in our wheels · unleashes or locks them
Yea he twins twentyfold · twines in our graveloot
breath of that sly snake · stifles and clings
slides from our long ships · coils round our steadings
Eala! we are lost in the spell · of his loopings."

--Earle Birney in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival

Medals Do No Good.

"...one famous critic informed his public that Beowulf was 'only small beer'. Yet if beer at all, it is a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death." --J R R Tolkien, "On Translating Beowulf"

This is how the world works.

( via / still from Kwaidan )

"Not only does the show feel cold because of the unfolding existential crisis it traces; it also needs that human intimacy because nearly all the other scenes in its early episodes take place in a video game."

"Important to realize Eclipses exist within massive Lineages called Saros cycles ,which last for about 2,000 yrs and wrap themselves around the Earth twice, from pole to pole, like a Great Gnostic Serpent. Current Solar Saros began May 17, 1501" --@HermeticAstro

"In the darkness of the jungle, Martim can move around with cover, savoring 'the strange music' that is 'the delicate friction of silence up against silence'."

"final descent"

cluster of swerves · swept clean
interface · i am onyx knife
to this cull kitchen · catch me asleep
in the rain-runnelled badlands · right here
i can hear the hesitations · of a hunkering crow

"Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting."

( via / via )

"The professional critic takes the signature posture of the age—that curious mixture of derision and addiction, indifference and engagement, nausea and engorgement before the buffet of contemporary culture—and turns it into a career." (via aldaily) (oops--sorry about the Douthatfus quote, i hadn't finished reading the article)

"ditty bag"

wheel in the sky · scatterlings
lasso a tangle of twigs
scuttlesome atoll

this dark dingle has claws
& questions that require you
to dance quicksand

jackdaws judge my big
sphinx of quartz · sferics
jinx the atmosphere

i trounce without a trace
the harsh bright happenstance
of a cloud treehouse

"I remember one [lecture] I attended, attended by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound."

"I shall wrassle me up a future or die trying." --Zora Neale Hurston

Music from Saharan Cellphones.

( me / via )

Run Like Hell.

“Oh, gross time passed–ah, yes, a jag of time, till a day came. A day of stupefaction.” –Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit.

"my job was beach"

Heatherdale returning
greenish the light
epochal the hurting
this one's fine
brickbats nerf

caraway remaining
what use doubt
bulwark made of hating
castled clown
Volapük nulik

returning to Heatherdale

"4 of 5 AI that I tested passed." (More.)

( via / via )

Confessions of the Hack Trade.

“Terzanelle Beginning with a Line by Plomer"

‘We came upon them there by accident,’
caught in the headlights’ glare at half past midnight.
After so much lost sleep, and sights to daunt
the stoutest heart: escaping through our net,
two children, barefoot, plainly terrified
caught in the headlights’ glare. At half past midnight
that alley saw flashes stun the brain, then fade.
Why would anyone bother to execute
two children, barefoot? Plainly terrified
we fled the way we came. Can’t sugar-coat
what happens in war and the panic haste of men.
Why would anyone bother? To execute
orders: you think you know what that must mean
walking the sniper streets like us. All zombie’d,
what happens in war and the panic haste of men
is a tragedy of clowns; our sins abide.

We came upon them there by accident
walking the sniper streets, like us all zombie’d
after so much lost sleep, and sights to daunt.

(2004)

"In an instant, that country was gone."

"I'm going to end up paying extra to not have AI in my next laptop, aren't I?" --@hmittelmark (via @mjohnharrison)

"Tell me you're tweaking without telling me you're tweaking."

( via / via )

"A beauty of ሰንጠረዥ /səntʼərəʒ/, Ethiopian Chess, is by nature no computer could truly defeat a great or even good player."

"Word of the Day: BUMBLEBROTH (n.) a confused mess" --@HaggardHawks

Assay only Glimpsable for an Instant.

"XX

The night is freezing fast,
To-morrow comes December;
And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
And chiefly I remember
How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
His overcoat for ever,
And wears the turning globe."

--A E Housman, Last Poems (1922)

"The crank philosopher Herr Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus is largely based [on] Jean Paul, though the mental portrait is more a reflection of Carlyle’s flinty conservatism than any beliefs his deutsche Meister might have held."

( via / via )

"I will see you soon enough."

"Too rare here,
verses revere her;
—a refill lasts…
a leaf, a sill.
A tree saw a side.
I died. I saw a sill;
ill, I was too rare:
viral, a river…
A root’s a will.
Ill, I saw a side,
I died.
I saw a seer.
Tall is a fae,
lasts all life.
Rare, here verses
revere her: a root."

--@MerlinaAcevedo

Discoveries in the Three-Body Problem. (animations)

Hey--for the jellyfish, things are looking up.

Githerments.

( via / via )

Got coffee?

What if the only thing to be learned from this is i should never have been sleeping sound in the first place?

This website is humanity's legacy.

"86 by Vennkotranār

Held back tears broken Red streaks across the rain lens eye
The burden of heavy pain slapped and stirred by loneliness
Might there be other listeners in this rising wet
Cold wind brushed through winter’s midnight
when a cow troubled by a fly shudders and sounds out
with metal tongue the cowbell’s cruel thin voice"

-- tr @naravive via

To understand recursion.

( via / me )

Listening to Joelma and making this horse.

"Binsey Poplars
felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene."

--G M Hopkins

Let justice.

"Bach’s 339. When I was a child, while reading one of Minulescu’s poems, I came across: 'Les fleures du mal and at page / three hundred and thirty-nine: La mort des amants.' I never found the edition he was referring to but in searching for it I fell in love with that number: 339." --@dreamsofbeing_

Sonnet-ghazal.

( via / via )

My work has been shapeshifting.

   "Through the worsening night
he howled horrors at the hopeless watchers;
swore to end them on the edge of his sword
in a morning massacre: that he meant to offer
their bodies gaping, to the Battle-Father
on the gallows-trees, a game for the corbies;
and they mourned in their sorrow."

--Rahul Gupta, from Beowulf

Silvics.

      "moon of three hares"

blind man bling · in the dawn golden
   glide on Renner Road
a stronger strange · you strive crisply
   the glare gluts your follythirst
this stone arch ails · by any hour's
   stilbfall or forgeabeyance

bright soaring · & the subfusc backdrop
   gather in the hall of the hapless
hoplites sequestered · inquirent qualms
   the cards show shattering
i know knaves rise · in a noxious scrum
   like this it's always them

Astral Tranquility.

( via / via )

"What is the point of hearing and seeing carnage?

yellow police tape
for endangered pergola
duck turquoise beyond

"It transcends astronomy."

There needs to be more films made by true misanthropes & not just misogynists.

DANCERS AFTER DARK.

( via )

"It is possible—given the way technology has quickened history, the cultural shift away from long-form reading, the screen’s preference for spectacle over dialogue, estrangement from art coded as 'white' or 'European,' and a measurable drop in attention spans—that Shakespeare will be even less intelligible."

"Komorebi 木漏れ日 literally, “sunlight filtering through trees,” is a Japanese word for the shimmering of light & shadows created by swaying leaves on the (forest) floor. Its dark-light dance only exists once, for a fleeting moment, never to be replicated in the same way." --@veracausa9

"The disconnect between public perception of academia vs. the reality is so immense." (thread)

"errand-ghost"

by bilm buffeted · i barely hold
what for the whitecaps · whelming & star-angered?

What the storm changed.

( via )

"What's yer fave fake album from a movie/tv show?"

Mallarmé: Salut

Zilch, froth, pure poem
Just to gar a goblet
So a distant flock dunks
Of mermaids, many upside down.

Sundry friends, we are sailing:
At the stern, already I stand;
Y’all at the stately bow break
That surge of sizzle & winter.

A wonderful wooziness prods me
Not recking even its roll
To hoist upright this hail

(Loneliness, lodgement, glimmer)
For whatever it is that earns
Our sheet’s wan shelter.

Fado.

"Universities are funny. Hey what if we took a medieval institution for training priests and aristocrats and combined it w a hedge fund, sports franchise and resort for teenagers

Oh and it'll be the backbone for fundamental research for our entire civilization" --@JLBornstein

"...all the buzz of implication..."

( via / via )

🔥🔥🌞Happy Equinox🌞🔥🔥.

"The unfinished or destroyed work—Canetti’s book against death, Tarkovsky’s film about forgetting, Dragomir’s notebooks on Time, Blecher’s novel, The Tomb; and many, many others, sometimes reborn from the pen of the same writer, other times as a haunting in someone else’s text…

Among the first things I ever wrote were epitaphs for those who did not have one, in the village cemetery, always carrying a pen and small pieces of paper in the pockets of my flowered dresses. I find myself now writing epitaphs for these works." --@dreamsofbeing_

Choice Morsels from the Bouzingo.

      "Vixen

Comet of stillness princess of what is over
   high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
   of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
   touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
   at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
   you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
   even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
   on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
   when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and contradictions
   that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
   had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
   and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
   places in the silence after the animals"

--WS Merwin via Verse Daily

Mural of a Refugee.

( via / via )

"To Hazlitt, Shakespeare’s plays are not set script or finished productions, any more than our own identities are, but creations coming into being through rehearsals of themselves, experiments in human nature, at a deep level prior to conscious plan or concept."

"wire cone sculpture"

arroyo rennet targe
indigo frass frogman
lives rent-free

saffron sky scavenged
lobster lanyard backtrack
skull-pile looming

Model A mentat
drive-through drugstore slog
murksome dree

The average road in Devon.

"White-maned horses · (hear their neighing!),
gray and gaunt-flanked, · gallop westward.
Wild with winter · winds, they snort and
buck when bearing · burdens for me."

--Poul Anderson (via)

I'm off to the doctors.