( via / me )

"The editor said he was the only editor in Canada who knew all his readers by their first names."

"At this point, human language fails to capture the scale of Gaza’s annihilation. What sufficiently captures the images we find on our screens, those images of Gaza’s living nightmare? Like scrolling and finding a flyer with instructions for adults on what to do when they find an orphaned child, immediately followed by videos of piles of limbs of murdered orphans? When Israel bombs the ruins of already-bombed out homes in northern Gaza? When it traps 1.4 million people in Rafah and then unleashes its 'fire belt' upon them? When most people have been living for months with less than 200 calories a day? In the face of the decimation of all aspects of life in Gaza, cowards in the west drag their feet and waste our time debating use of the term 'genocide' to disrupt meaningful action to end Israel’s campaign of total annihilation.

Consistent with the failure of humanity to take action to protect Palestinian life, our language fails Gaza too." --@yalawiya (via @vorfrreude)

"What’s surely happened is some specially eloquent seventeenth-century British smarty-pants read the North and Holland translations, misremembered ’em, and created the mot that’s been repeated ever since." (via a thread on twxttxr)

pain that can wait · the panned stream
announced numbingly · neighbor ramble
wait for the wink · this waltz with silicon
deeds that were done · while we lay limp

"All architects may unwittingly be working on the same building."

( via / via )

Gnossienne No. 1.

sweet embers, add
to the reconciled rummage
old records

shadow thrown threatening
from a light held low
thift-lucky

secondhand signs flicker
on a back road barricade
& safe bets

clowning through the ash-clasp

Attenuated Code of Hammurabi.

"Get revenge on the Danes by using these native English words instead of Norse ones↓

An egg is an EY

A gift is a YEAVE

To hit is to SLAY

A knife is a SAX

A leg is a SHANK

An outlaw is a WRETCH

A skill is a CRAFT

Your skin is your HIDE

The sky is the HEAVEN

To take is to NIM

A window is an EYETHRILL

A wing is a FITHER"

--@wylfcen

Liquid Meteor.

( via / via )

I learned there is a kind of green tea that smells & tastes like gardenias.

"Alone, he saw the slanting waves roll in,
Each to its impotent annihilation
In a long wash of foam, until the sound
Become for him a warning and a torture,
Like a malign reproof reiterating
In vain its cold and only sound of doom."

― Edwin Arlington Robinson, 𝘛𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘮 (via @isidro_li)

» Cubensis Trip 03 « ✨🎶.

“Wicked waif! unworthy,
Woeful wretch! What threshings
Reaped from hate and hurt you
Hurl from sinner’s innards!
Words you pour are poison—
Poor, unfit for spitting.
That is why you walk these
Wastes alone and throneless.”

--Luke Maynard

Signs. (via Dreams Built by Hand)

( via / via )

"...following Coleridge’s own often reiterated assertion that poetry is intrinsically serpentine, critics have hurried to churn out analyses of Coleridge’s creative praxis in those terms..."

"Where, indeed,
On this night lodging
Might I find; my hunting robes
Sash tightening; with the evening sun
Storm winds come from the peak."

--Fujiwara no Teika

"...seems to be linked to when papyrus / paper forms are adopted in a culture, allowing for fluid shapes."

"Learned today that before Germans called wrens Zaunkönige (“fence kings”), they said Schneekönige or ‘snow-kings’, because wrens sing loudly even in the winter. Germans even have the expression ‘happy like a snow king’ to describe someone who’s joyful in a grim situation." --@wylfcen

Air Raid ready cat in carrier, 1941.

( via / via )

Terence, this is stupid stuff.

"SEER (Palindrome by Pairs)

Seer, ever thin,
desire to reside
in the reverse."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Hellfluencer.

various devourings · in the predawn light
later squirrel lunges · from the sidelines
a wad of wood · i veer to avoid
i imagine moving · among the gun nuts gathered
not only flags · flying upside down

with my bare hands saving the world

"Well, I think that you see this with a lot of things all over the place. The big brand does really well. CVS is doing really well, but maybe all the shops that used to make up the rest of the city have been decimated. They’re not there anymore. They’re all replaced by chains so you have a few chain brands. I think that’s true in clothing, it’s true in media, it’s true in literature." (via aldaily)

( via / via )

It's not a war.

"A rainbow, of black-clothed figures; all family met, except for the one.

White flowers, arrive like raindrops; painting the hall, a pearled canvas.

The shadows, as we pass before the light; our whispers toll, thus is life."

--@AmericanSijo

We were promised jetpacks.

"The Muscogee language has FIVE past tenses and I need you to be excited about it bc it’s freakin cool

Recent Past (just now)
Hodiernal (earlier today)
Prehodiernal (before today)
Annual (earlier this year)
Distant Past (several years ago)
Mythic Past (legendary past)"

--@lingdiscovery

In lieu of a memorial. This.

( via / via )

Cosmic Type.

"We, the tadpoles of this damp
Miasmal and malarial swamp
Await you, son of Aristotle--
But each is but an axolotl..."

--Artorius

"These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United State."

engaged in the gears · of a Friday frenzy
lanes disallowed · lacking all mercy
adds fear to affordance · & bitterness to bounty

"By the way, that was one of the most stressful things for me ever. Like, every single time I wanted to go shopping for food, there was a new grocery store and everything was in a different place."

( via / via )

Day 138: Courier.

ricecake-dry throat busking
this cave no beast's haven
Mars red & black charcoal
Fimbul winter's minting

yet things banned from lung's reach
grow deep-strong in the songbook
wipe away the trappings
leave has forced your voice wear

"But then I suppose for your edge-walkers, at a certain point only the mainstream at its most gross and vapid becomes truly transgressive,... authentic Americana... the kind of exoticism / slumming combo that leads brainy people people to get into wrestling or demolition derbies or what-have-you..."

"Maybe we were the wrong inheritors of the planet and after a few million years the Creator has come around to restore the balance; even so we had our points." --Phase IV

""When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening..."

( via / via )

A solitary journey.

   " 'She's right,' Hubbs said in a small voice. 'You must listen to her. But she's wrong too. They don't want to kill us.'
   The computer cut in with a whop! Lesko heard the chattering. 'They don't?' he said. 'What do they want to do, then? Change our life-style?' " --Phase IV

Seven headed petroglyph.

"On Re-Reading Baudelaire

Forgetting still what holier lilies bloom
Secure within the garden of lost years,
We water with the fitfulness of tears
Wan myrtles with an acrid sick perfume;
Lethean lotus, laurels of our doom,
Dark amarant with tall unswaying spears,
Await funereal autumn and its fears
In this grey land that sullen suns illume.
Ivy and rose and hellebore we twine.
Voluptuous as love, or keen as grief,
Some fleeing fragrance lures us in the gloom
To Paphian dells or vales of Proserpine. . . .
But all the flowers, with dark or pallid leaf,
Become at last a garland for the tomb."

--Clark Ashton Smith via via

Avarice Reverie.

( via / via )

From an 18th or 19th century Malay compilation and treatise on the amuletic arts.

Spiral Jetty jarhead
gyrovaganti hauntsome
two sheets to the khamsin
& a cold blue mouldwarp

An Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula.

"For Wallis and Fortuna

The modus operandi of one whole slew of the semaphorists I hang with
Is to waggle violently our flag-savvy arms, as if to excoriate
The shredding mists into a witness’d departure. Of irrepressibly less interest

Is the scuppernong blush wines we like to pour out, compounding
The general hubbub with appetites sauvages, or merely pickled.
That is how we do it out here in the greeny pluglands."

--John Latta, 2004

"Like everybody else, I probably read less of it than I imagine: poetry’s constituted rather like a fine Moroccan cous-cous—it swells big in the stomachs of us who’re willing to sup on it regularly.."

( via / via )

Ducktails II.

"Sooner or later he will go to Caerleon,
There to be crowned. And I shall be commissioned
To compose his coronation poem.
Well, I suppose a Pindaric ode might serve."

--Artorius

» Daydream « ✨🎶.

dust-caked contradiction
dernely in glare terror
the blue flicker flowing
the flask morning gasket

brisk assassin's ceasefire
soils the graygreen plague pit
in the walg-walled wigwam
a whipped penguin bingos

"So while Bourne 1 is built around a blank trauma that is then filled in with detail, Green Zone is built around a detailed trauma that is then erased."

( via/ ed paschke )

The Yeti Speaks.

the riotous wastefont · dovesong walg

when my heart's hent · is to hide far

System.

"Mute Death's sable minion
moves to muffled drumbeat.
raven-clad still rider
raises fiercesome spear shaft.
Blind Hoð's deadly dark tipped
dart brings glooming heartache;
brooding stormclouds baleful
broke by lightnings' white fire."

--Thomas Ireland-Delfs (via)

Parked on a snowy night.

( me / via )

On my way back home after work.

"I ride earth's burning carrousel
Day in, day out..."

--Sylvia Plath

No pollen here, just spring.

into the algorithm
tutelary tapeworm
idiot targe

Charles TCATI
an anti-castle arch
chav orca

burning in botulism
hour that is my angst shadow
burying echo

Poolside vibes .

( via / via )

Army surplus shop dressing going in surprisingly hard.

lost in the luscious · larceny of rose
a ruler riddled · weary & wise
burning to bother · bystander rocks
incapable of carving · curve for a butterfly

"Indeed, walking the Paris streets was for Gertrude and other lesbians an act of defiance, and as she and Alice became more recognizable, more deliberate about their appearance, these public displays became more akin to a queer performance..."

So many poets, generations of poets now, who don't seem to be able to hear the sounds of poetry. They write to fill a shape in the page. Why do they do it then? To fulfill some idea of "being a poet".

"Sometimes the mystery has a poetry of its own."

( lanny quarles on fb / via )

"Not long ago, almost everything I wrote had to go through gatekeepers (almost always sitting in an office in New York) before a single reader saw it. Then I decided to bypass the system too."

"Hey man my AI dating concierge read your book and loved it" --@john_attridge

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic."

"We Came Out of the Night

made the left at Rocksprings
and hit the South Texas heat
wave in a '49 Mercury, lowered with skirts
&leadedin front hood, roll'd & pleat'd & built
for fast trips to the border. It was black.
Outside Del Rio the air shimmers white
shattered into pastel & red afterimages.
The heat decides everything. Suspends
thought. Cactus dominate."

--Robert Trammell, from No Evidence (2001)

"But Jarry, Ballard, Husker Du, and Trammell are not merely being punk delinquent vandals; I believe they each had deeper purposes in mind."

( via prentiss riddle on fb / via )

"I hope to try an experiment with Enochian."

"IO (Only two vowels, alternating)

Long I trod, dislodging rocks,
blind on Io’s wilds….

Now I hold
this cosmic god,
this fossil of iron;
this lost lion
with torn wings:

Now,
I hold
Io’s sphinx."

--@Anthony_Etherin

The joys of Ligeti and Hannigan.

"As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on Earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times." ~ Gary Snyder via Amy Martin on Fb

Von DUNE und Game of Thrones lernen – wie man Sprachen erfindet.

( via / via )

I have a photo of you.

"This morning I re-read the 12th (unnumbered) section of the first poem I ever read by Ron Silliman, *Ketjak.* It's the one that uses the words 'aardwolf' and 'adz' and, toward the middle, the sentence 'A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, fringed surreys, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line,' which first appears as the poem's second sentence, in § 2.
   I discovered Ron somewhere between Marilyn Hacker, Rae Armantrout (to whom *Ketjak* is dedicated), and Anne Carson.
   Silliman was born on August 5, 1946, and I have met him a few times here in Philadelphia at Kelly Writers' House (where he mentioned to me, in passing, that the "revolving door" that opens the poem, belonged to the Bank of America, somewhere in San Francisco), and also at the Naropa Summer Writing Project.
   I've also read most of his poem *The Alphabet*—which compares favorably to Wordsworth's "The Prelude"—my favorite section of which is "Skys" (p. [cetera desunt]
   I think it fair to say we belong to a mutual admiration society . . . and it has given me hours and, indeed, weeks of pleasure since Larry McCaffrey first suggested I read him, sometime between 1970 and 75. Without him, I certainly wouldn't be the reader I have managed to become." --Samuel R Delany on Fb

Black Widow iris.

departed-sparkle · pillage team
lowering clouds · cluster like worries
a nacreous needed · nap shrivels

if i ever erred · & then doubled down
on my wretched wrong · ravens have sailed
since & unsaying · is eke no option

rain batters · the barrier of glass
i have to use headlights · Kharkiv falls
two pledge drives · the drake tittering

"I once bought two of the same short-sleeve, stretch-cotton button-down shirt to wear with my suits, despite the fact that Theory had named it the Aniston."

( via / via )

The Saddest Scripts.

(for a contest)

nightmarish distortions seemed satire
in Steadman’s cool 70s hauteur
   now the beasts in the courtroom,
   high court & boardroom
defy all depiction & contour

1984? commercial for Pepsi directed by Ridley Scott.

"So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me."

― Herman Melville, 𝘔𝘰𝘣𝘺-𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘰𝘳, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘦 (via @Isidro_Li)

"Come around the campfire and let me tell you the tragic tale of what befell #OwnVoices."

( via / me )

The Love Poems of Johannes Secundus.

"Walked into the UPS to find an employee standing over a large open box, peering into its depths, muttering [']my god, we will ship anything.' Then he closed the box and taped it up in a fury like it contained horrors not imagined since Pandora. I must know what is in this box." --@tyler_a_harper

Experimental Fiction on Film.

         "A row of sherries

Like a thick row
Like a windy row
Like a monotonous row
His nature is still his
   nature
Frail is he who
   recognizes the rowing of the hair,
      the snow of the rib, the fright
         of his quarrels
In rowing he rows a
   row, waiting across his appreciation, frail
      from deference
This dun colored police has no velvet
   for anyone
He can hear the door
   of the spark
He does not see
   my dark, my snow, my air
These things flirt, soft, run, like
   frightened sherries
There are these indefinite days,
   beyond which a sailor glances itself
At midsummer he swims me
Even though dark is plashless, he
   has dark in
      his clover
Often running, surrendering, drawing bitterly
   at a frightened
      door"

--Robot X, 3181

"I did not do it/ for God reasons..."

( via / via )

Stocha Acid Zlook.

      epigram

Time tranforms itself and so do we in time.
   For what? To reach the utmost imperfection.

--John Owen (my tr.)

(The original Latin is:

tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in ille;
   quomodo? fit semper tempore peior homo.

There is a wikipedia article on "Tempora Mutantur.")

House of Bamboo.

"Passive-Aggression is the Hero with a Thousand Faces." --sayings of Asmodeus

Obluvion.

( via / via )

Poets of the uncanny.

"every one deals in paper money; few have ever handled gold. we live on symbols, and even on the symbols of symbols; we have never grasped or verified things for ourselves; we judge everything, and we know nothing."

--henri frédéric amiel
tr. mrs. humphry ward (via @infinita_fiori)

"I encroached and called it a rill. I never heard of that, my wife said, and I replied, Read any Cormac McCarthy novel — he uses it as least once and maybe twice per novel..."

exuviae zither · pizzazz shed
room rustling with · wrong attempts
mists multiplied · in the mood of this returning
album excavated · artificial light

a sphinx ferreted · forceful query
once for the wayfarer's · web clearing
& duly decorated · daub therefrom
a story strained · through stereo stulms

all far now furious · as the floods tumble
nor raft to hand · helpful rune
i gather the gormless · guts of a teddybear
the landscape lathered · with loose visions

mower this morning · not muted by blinds
Pluto placated · to replace noise

"Lightning flicks its riding whip..."

( via / via )

New Synapse.

"I also have one piece of news that will be sadder for some of you, which is that after about twelve years running, I'm shutting down Autistic Book Party... When I started this project, back in 2011, it was genuinely hard to find openly autistic authors of speculative fiction for adults. I knew there was interest in that topic, as a part of the big, post-RaceFail wave of interest in representation; but my list was pretty tiny and janky. The only one I knew of who worked with traditional publishers was Caiseal Mór. In 2011, it seemed to me that, if I worked hard and focused, I could get through the entire list... In the baker's dozen of years since 2011, I've watched as authors I already knew and admired obtained diagnoses, self-diagnosed, or came out publicly. I've watched #ownvoices autistic authors like Essa Hansen, Alex White, and Caitlin Starling burst into Big 5 debuts. I've watched an even bigger explosion of autistic and neurodivergent voices in self-publishing... More recently I've watched some very big names quietly, casually come out as autistic. Seanan McGuire tweeted about being autistic in 2023. Neil Gaiman casually came out as autistic on Tumblr this spring. ...and I'm sure others have already said something that, for whatever reason, I just haven't seen. I love that Neil Gaiman is one of us, but in a weird way, Neil Gaiman was the last straw. What does it actually mean to boost autistic voices in a world where there are autistic authors who've won staggering numbers of Hugos already?" --Ada Hoffmann

La machine à écrire.

CS Lewis: “When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?" --@MiaFarrow

Generative Art Timeline.

( via / via )

Four Short Films by Vince Collins.

"Give a man a fish and he'll probably cook it in the break room microwave." --@the_etrain@beige.party

Borderland.

"Running the Planet Trail

2.8 billion miles still to go. Something
is slipping. Something pulls.

Under the dual carriageway I witness parallels:
my concrete hamstrings, its tattooed struts.

O east-west artery, shade me; I can’t take the heat.

I should’ve stopped at Mars with its anklet of beer cans and vapes.
I should’ve backtracked to Venus.

Yesterday in the cathedral I saw tourists with headphones
crawling all over St Frideswide’s shrine

while on the north wall a map of Ukraine
beaconed its colours to anyone capable of feeling.

The prayer cards on the wrought-iron tree said ‘My niece’ and ‘My godson’
and ‘exam stress’ and ‘a hole in his heart’. The sun sloped in.

Light a candle while the soldiers bank and dive.
Light a hundred candles while they cover their ears.

Names, names, names. Knees, knees, knees.
How big and alive we are! And then.

Reprogram the audio-guides. Pray to your god for a well,
a cooling rain. Should I go on?

In the lee of a fisherman, two young rabbits shiny with dew.
A collared dove some way past Jupiter."

--Rebecca Watts in Bad Lilies 18

The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed.

( via / via )

"Horses" & "Hey Joe".

"vineyards of
the buddha on the moor
still sweet"

--@poem_exe 2014

Bathory.

"Here's Estonian sentence without consonants for you.

„Aoäia õe uue oaõieaia õueaua ööau“

stands for, according to its creator Andres Ehin, 'Night-honour of a watching dog in the garden of fresh beanflowers belonging to the sister of my sunrisy father-in-law.' " --@BogataTimar

Ragnarök Live.

( via / via )

Formosan Gothic.

"I need to buy a sympathy card for the family of a 13-year-old who died by suicide, and it feels like an insurmountable task. How can there be a card for such a thing?" --@shaindelr

The Romanesque Lyric: Studies in its Background and Development from Petronius to the Cambridge Songs 50-1050.

Hvergelmir Voorwerp
avouch · shadows slouching
in dark · slalom lurksome
ladle of blame framing

midnight path to Mothra

Recent Jorie Graham interview.