"To give one's self to one's poem is also to risk being
violated by it." --Antonin Artaud, 1944
'We have abolished the true world. ...With the true
world we have also abolished the apparent one.' --Nietzsche
"Gurdjieff elevated charlatanism into a world principle."
--Lowenfels
'But the world is neither significant nor absurd.' --Robbe-
Grillet, 1957
"Rosy-fingered Ramadan"
The work, And like Abracadabra To fall
into this wine
He
pours. is of the swarm. Scene
continues in a changed tone O Cassilda, Nudity does
anyone remember Once
Raps clack
Calcspar; I will you will Cut
them I
came a vision I smell
anything.
Salt Is ebony Metaphor.
(10/03)
'386. If we dreamed the same thing every night, it would
affect us as much as the objects we see every day. ...But
since dreams are all different, and each single one is
diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less...
For life is a dream a little less inconstant.' --Pascal, Pensées
Friday, October 31, 2003
"Time Change
Autumn never came too soon for her. She
loved the swirl of colors in the late afternoon as she sipped
tea and looked out the picture window. Across the way she
observed a boy plodding along the sidewalk.
As the youngster headed home, his backpack heavy
with books, he wondered why summer ended so early."
--Melanie D. Pruit (a "Fifty Five Fiction")
Autumn never came too soon for her. She
loved the swirl of colors in the late afternoon as she sipped
tea and looked out the picture window. Across the way she
observed a boy plodding along the sidewalk.
As the youngster headed home, his backpack heavy
with books, he wondered why summer ended so early."
--Melanie D. Pruit (a "Fifty Five Fiction")
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Ouch!
Gender Genie thinks the 2 computer poems i
posted on Oct 27 are female--by a score of 275
to 135.
Gender Genie thinks the 2 computer poems i
posted on Oct 27 are female--by a score of 275
to 135.
A Tale of Two Blogs.
Listening to: Miles Davis- "Concierto de
Aranjuez".
[Apologies for the fragmented character
of the following single poem. Blogger
made me do it!!!!]
Listening to: Miles Davis- "Concierto de
Aranjuez".
[Apologies for the fragmented character
of the following single poem. Blogger
made me do it!!!!]
'Season of Flames
FLASH!
In a blaze of magnesium
The entire city like a silhouette
Crumbles.
Not a sound
But consciousness
tossed softly into an empty space.
And the remote
self
Just now interred.
Millions of glass-splinters in flight
Old beams heavier than lead
And wall clay, with a thud,
Give the final stroke.
Outside is
Bizarre grey,
Distorted roofs,
Tangle of electric wires,
Full of human smell,
Yet void of human life,
Thousands of acres of
Dead
silence.
FLASH!
In a blaze of magnesium
The entire city like a silhouette
Crumbles.
Not a sound
But consciousness
tossed softly into an empty space.
And the remote
self
Just now interred.
Millions of glass-splinters in flight
Old beams heavier than lead
And wall clay, with a thud,
Give the final stroke.
Outside is
Bizarre grey,
Distorted roofs,
Tangle of electric wires,
Full of human smell,
Yet void of human life,
Thousands of acres of
Dead
silence.
Sudden uprise of dark brown mountains
From flattened Hiroshima
At the bottom of a crater-like basin,
Outrageous upheaval.
It rises up and plunges down,
Shaking back and
Casting upward
Clouds,
Clouds,
Clouds,
Scarlet, orange, violet,
Expanding in lurid eruption.
The air
Gushing forth through chasms
In the smoke-ridden earth,
Hurtling one upon the other,
Exploding, shooting
Boiling torrents into the stratosphere.
There come for the first time
Hissing whispers,
Then rumbling of the earth beneath,
Groaning waves, ear-splitting shock.
From flattened Hiroshima
At the bottom of a crater-like basin,
Outrageous upheaval.
It rises up and plunges down,
Shaking back and
Casting upward
Clouds,
Clouds,
Clouds,
Scarlet, orange, violet,
Expanding in lurid eruption.
The air
Gushing forth through chasms
In the smoke-ridden earth,
Hurtling one upon the other,
Exploding, shooting
Boiling torrents into the stratosphere.
There come for the first time
Hissing whispers,
Then rumbling of the earth beneath,
Groaning waves, ear-splitting shock.
Uranium 235
Causes in this city, picked out,
An apparition of the man-made sun
500 metres high above the sky.
8.15 a.m.
(Punctually)
The citizens summoned
Into the streets in the centre of town.
Hiroshima now submerged
In black tangled smoke
Like coarse public hair
Under the sun with dust in its eyes
Throbbing and contracting,
The restless tongues of flame
Lick the flayed skin
Of men.
A black shower,
Fluttering in the whirlwind,
Chokes the mouths crying for loved ones.
Causes in this city, picked out,
An apparition of the man-made sun
500 metres high above the sky.
8.15 a.m.
(Punctually)
The citizens summoned
Into the streets in the centre of town.
Hiroshima now submerged
In black tangled smoke
Like coarse public hair
Under the sun with dust in its eyes
Throbbing and contracting,
The restless tongues of flame
Lick the flayed skin
Of men.
A black shower,
Fluttering in the whirlwind,
Chokes the mouths crying for loved ones.
Under a strange rainbow,
Rows,
Rows,
Of ghosts filing past
Trying to escape from the town,
Like ants from a broken nest
Filling the streets;
Hands hanging
Listlessly
Inch
By inch
A procession of animals,
That once were men.
A slow current threads its way
Through the space filled
With hot blast and strange odour
With no sky and no earth,
Into the river's seven
separate branches
Drifting without end
Bloated and flayed
Bodies scrape
against islets
In the estuary.
Rows,
Rows,
Of ghosts filing past
Trying to escape from the town,
Like ants from a broken nest
Filling the streets;
Hands hanging
Listlessly
Inch
By inch
A procession of animals,
That once were men.
A slow current threads its way
Through the space filled
With hot blast and strange odour
With no sky and no earth,
Into the river's seven
separate branches
Drifting without end
Bloated and flayed
Bodies scrape
against islets
In the estuary.
At Bikini that time
The thousands and thousands of tons
Of sea water gushing
From the atoll reflected only
In the innocent, ignorant eyes
Of pigs,
sheep,
apes
Left there for the test--
And the fish in the foam
(Ah but we are not fish, we cannot
Quietly roll over and show
Our white bellies in death).
The sun boils on and
The rain seeps into
Acres and acres of rubble.
Indeed, Hiroshima has risen
Three feet higher
On the rubble and white bones.
The thousands and thousands of tons
Of sea water gushing
From the atoll reflected only
In the innocent, ignorant eyes
Of pigs,
sheep,
apes
Left there for the test--
And the fish in the foam
(Ah but we are not fish, we cannot
Quietly roll over and show
Our white bellies in death).
The sun boils on and
The rain seeps into
Acres and acres of rubble.
Indeed, Hiroshima has risen
Three feet higher
On the rubble and white bones.
Dead: 247,000
Missing: 14,000
Injured: 38,000
In the A-bomb museum
Baked stones,
Melted slates,
And deformed glass bottles are shown
And pamphlets of city planning
For tourist hotels
gathering
Dust.
Even today
In 1951
Clouds are towering and burning,
And two white flying spots
Brushing past them
As they drift.
Look, there are the white spots.
From across the world the parachutes remotely
Controlled are come to take the radiation count:
The parachutes
Of that morning,
Stamped on the retinae
Of Hiroshima Tribe
Now gently floating
Behind the clouds again.'
--Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima Poems
Missing: 14,000
Injured: 38,000
In the A-bomb museum
Baked stones,
Melted slates,
And deformed glass bottles are shown
And pamphlets of city planning
For tourist hotels
gathering
Dust.
Even today
In 1951
Clouds are towering and burning,
And two white flying spots
Brushing past them
As they drift.
Look, there are the white spots.
From across the world the parachutes remotely
Controlled are come to take the radiation count:
The parachutes
Of that morning,
Stamped on the retinae
Of Hiroshima Tribe
Now gently floating
Behind the clouds again.'
--Sankichi Toge, Hiroshima Poems
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
"Butoh News"
body he believed himself anointed by the
rest...terrible though it seems that the
Yellow Blixen Glaugnea Angel
Candle in #Mexico.
a swirl of the one Technology
is a fandango, and the
hand:with a reason to snatch it
hardly matters what; and yet
things are very often feel &
is quick to him, dull of the
same murky sense of each dipped in Baja:] The Allies today
though its sign: to make
bears dance natives painted like
the dark particles Of what I
found 8 lines i like: could not possible he
Gorge the immense
and stripes slacken; I cultivate humanist attitudes
i care least textbooks
as for the title some more news you
know the Death of
And it away and in order
not stand Nor lifts
the building of the devil
take 10
50 PM Chinese Braille.
(10/03)
body he believed himself anointed by the
rest...terrible though it seems that the
Yellow Blixen Glaugnea Angel
Candle in #Mexico.
a swirl of the one Technology
is a fandango, and the
hand:with a reason to snatch it
hardly matters what; and yet
things are very often feel &
is quick to him, dull of the
same murky sense of each dipped in Baja:] The Allies today
though its sign: to make
bears dance natives painted like
the dark particles Of what I
found 8 lines i like: could not possible he
Gorge the immense
and stripes slacken; I cultivate humanist attitudes
i care least textbooks
as for the title some more news you
know the Death of
And it away and in order
not stand Nor lifts
the building of the devil
take 10
50 PM Chinese Braille.
(10/03)
Until we quit calling our mental static Freedom we will
never have any use for silence.
The myth of Babel is only lately true.
Nobody leads; but among those who join, some are
facing forward, some backward, and some are whirling
around.
'By the mere fact of having happened, reality projects
its shadow back into the past indefinitely far; so it
seems like it has always existed, in the form of the
possibility of its own realization.' --Bergson
never have any use for silence.
The myth of Babel is only lately true.
Nobody leads; but among those who join, some are
facing forward, some backward, and some are whirling
around.
'By the mere fact of having happened, reality projects
its shadow back into the past indefinitely far; so it
seems like it has always existed, in the form of the
possibility of its own realization.' --Bergson
"...invention has [nothing] to do with the noise you
make while breaking rules. ...I think it has to do with
the subtlety with which you adhere to premises somewhat
different from those that may be expected of you." --Glenn
Gould
"Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken,
and you'll see the most frightful kind of stupidity." --Werner
Herzog [Although, one has to ask what is the word for a
world-famous film director eye-to-eye with his feathered
friend...]
'In every man there is a Pyrrhonism [skepticism] that is
proof against any dogmatism, and a dogmatism invincible
to any Pyrrhonism.' --Pascal
make while breaking rules. ...I think it has to do with
the subtlety with which you adhere to premises somewhat
different from those that may be expected of you." --Glenn
Gould
"Take a close and very long look into the eye of a chicken,
and you'll see the most frightful kind of stupidity." --Werner
Herzog [Although, one has to ask what is the word for a
world-famous film director eye-to-eye with his feathered
friend...]
'In every man there is a Pyrrhonism [skepticism] that is
proof against any dogmatism, and a dogmatism invincible
to any Pyrrhonism.' --Pascal
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
My first Fifty Five Fiction. "After Bush III had
won by a landslide his second term, people pretty
much stopped voting. This did not affect the victory
margin of Bush IV. It is said that the exodus began
then, but that is incorrect. The exodus really only
began when, failing to find another Bush to run,
they substituted a capybara."
won by a landslide his second term, people pretty
much stopped voting. This did not affect the victory
margin of Bush IV. It is said that the exodus began
then, but that is incorrect. The exodus really only
began when, failing to find another Bush to run,
they substituted a capybara."
Art is the shallowest cause and the deepest symptom.
"Gothic Lolita Bible Study"
via
Enigmatic moped Or at something
like the War to opine. it tenuous Chameleon man
begin, resultant Of
fraud befrauding those are the
Free gift change he;
pronounces the fleeces of the of machine translated from black
blogtitle {: Verdana, Arial, ;color: white;} barkhang and what
has painted the
name for grope continuing
slag Kudzu rhost Consequential gleam? Goblin
the rest of our
own way he must; look upon all are linked
with the average
wage, by persons
believing themselves in the
ground in this
is also The
swagger of school austere
Alien of view &
veracity; ambiguity & the source of
it was
inventorying books My invented language
Spook the next night at something in Calabria posted
by michael at least, textbooks as well
as they were ending their solitude
As cats are parent.
(10/03)
'It should be noted, however, that the picture's title
never tells its subject--and this is particularly true
with those artists who, by an engaging fusion of
horrors, mix sentiment with wit. In this way, by
extending the method, it will be possible to achieve
the sentimental rebus.' --Baudelaire, 1846
"People can adapt to anything as long as they don't
question the context." --Ernest Alcorn, 1972
"The new formula may be in part the result of the
Revolution without being its expression.' --Victor
Hugo, 1824 [--Rock.]
"By 1914, when the whites started killing each other,
they controlled eighty five percent of the earth's
surface." --Richard Miller, Bohemia (1977)
"Gothic Lolita Bible Study"
via
Enigmatic moped Or at something
like the War to opine. it tenuous Chameleon man
begin, resultant Of
fraud befrauding those are the
Free gift change he;
pronounces the fleeces of the of machine translated from black
blogtitle {: Verdana, Arial, ;color: white;} barkhang and what
has painted the
name for grope continuing
slag Kudzu rhost Consequential gleam? Goblin
the rest of our
own way he must; look upon all are linked
with the average
wage, by persons
believing themselves in the
ground in this
is also The
swagger of school austere
Alien of view &
veracity; ambiguity & the source of
it was
inventorying books My invented language
Spook the next night at something in Calabria posted
by michael at least, textbooks as well
as they were ending their solitude
As cats are parent.
(10/03)
'It should be noted, however, that the picture's title
never tells its subject--and this is particularly true
with those artists who, by an engaging fusion of
horrors, mix sentiment with wit. In this way, by
extending the method, it will be possible to achieve
the sentimental rebus.' --Baudelaire, 1846
"People can adapt to anything as long as they don't
question the context." --Ernest Alcorn, 1972
"The new formula may be in part the result of the
Revolution without being its expression.' --Victor
Hugo, 1824 [--Rock.]
"By 1914, when the whites started killing each other,
they controlled eighty five percent of the earth's
surface." --Richard Miller, Bohemia (1977)
Monday, October 27, 2003
"Vancouver has come into its own in the nineties," writes Paul Delany, "with three best selling authors--Douglas Coupland, Nick Bantock, William Gibson... who seem utterly globalized, stylized, and deracinated producers of a 'location-independent' literature." --review of City of Glass
" poll conducted among INFOCUS readers had established "waka" as the
proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >, though
some readers held out resolutely for "norkies." The text of the poem
follows:
<>!*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number
four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--found on the way
"Wels Diamot
Rints grome of stoneted
Have se frow declart
Wries eve he storferst
Hass difird gapat
Luspeciestretwe
Beene namone encame
Sur ded clarearthe
Cumstly publingain
Itil that coureland
Havinernce I honse
Luserst mat paland
Wilarlich und conce."
--Jonathan R Partington
" poll conducted among INFOCUS readers had established "waka" as the
proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters < and >, though
some readers held out resolutely for "norkies." The text of the poem
follows:
<>!*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number
four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."
--found on the way
"Wels Diamot
Rints grome of stoneted
Have se frow declart
Wries eve he storferst
Hass difird gapat
Luspeciestretwe
Beene namone encame
Sur ded clarearthe
Cumstly publingain
Itil that coureland
Havinernce I honse
Luserst mat paland
Wilarlich und conce."
--Jonathan R Partington
Imagine performed music to be forbidden
--& a hundred years passes--& only those
who can read sheet music to themselves,
imagining the notes in their head, have
music.
A couple of computer poems from Horizon,
May '62:
"MICE
The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."
"ROSES
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."
What one must know about the Sun.
No fasting on the Day of Doubt.
--& a hundred years passes--& only those
who can read sheet music to themselves,
imagining the notes in their head, have
music.
A couple of computer poems from Horizon,
May '62:
"MICE
The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates."
"ROSES
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Why is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious , blind planes are coming.
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender."
What one must know about the Sun.
No fasting on the Day of Doubt.
"Incursion"
The shadows lengthen In forms Of
the One quick nocturnal
Interloper could leave you at
times assuages.
Having found
He'sky lie too?
It'till my lilies
You'think about to Maremma! Approaches. Salt Is said
that saddest light, sodium attack Converts tragedy to wield
such a bulwark of emptiness?
Is high parabolas Or culture.
Furnishings are masked.
hours.
(10/03)
'...whenever there are political parties, democracy is
dead.' --Weil, L'Enracinement (1943)
'Uprootedness breeds idolatry.' --ibid
'The realism which I care about and want is what happens
in the head of the spectator and not what is on the screen.'
--Fassbinder
'Scepticism is a bad conductor of poetry.' --Jean Cocteau
Self knowledge looks like destruction when the knowledge
is of a self-destructive self, but that knowledge really only
destroys those incompatible illusions we mistook for part
of us, and which were crippling us. The most convincing,
ubiquitous illusion is power. As "knowledge" is an incom-
plete, context-less understanding, so power is action
without considering consequences; the adage "Knowledge
is power" is subsumed by "Understanding is powerless
doing" (wei-wu)...
'Of all the parts of the body there is none so cold as
the brain.' --Aristotle
'The public is content to admire doors which go nowhere.'
--Cocteau (1921)
Idea: that consciousness arises in those who are ON THE
EDGE--of cultures, races, classes, sexes, conditions,
sanity, history, places, etc--they have familiarity with two
different modes of being which prevents them from falling
into either conformity... Consciousness is nature healing
a split in humans.
The role of the artist has become untenable, just when the
myth of the artist has reached its furthest inflation. It is
time to say: Human is enough.
All day long we wear the face that monkeys reserve for
a lion about to eat them.
The shadows lengthen In forms Of
the One quick nocturnal
Interloper could leave you at
times assuages.
Having found
He'sky lie too?
It'till my lilies
You'think about to Maremma! Approaches. Salt Is said
that saddest light, sodium attack Converts tragedy to wield
such a bulwark of emptiness?
Is high parabolas Or culture.
Furnishings are masked.
hours.
(10/03)
'...whenever there are political parties, democracy is
dead.' --Weil, L'Enracinement (1943)
'Uprootedness breeds idolatry.' --ibid
'The realism which I care about and want is what happens
in the head of the spectator and not what is on the screen.'
--Fassbinder
'Scepticism is a bad conductor of poetry.' --Jean Cocteau
Self knowledge looks like destruction when the knowledge
is of a self-destructive self, but that knowledge really only
destroys those incompatible illusions we mistook for part
of us, and which were crippling us. The most convincing,
ubiquitous illusion is power. As "knowledge" is an incom-
plete, context-less understanding, so power is action
without considering consequences; the adage "Knowledge
is power" is subsumed by "Understanding is powerless
doing" (wei-wu)...
'Of all the parts of the body there is none so cold as
the brain.' --Aristotle
'The public is content to admire doors which go nowhere.'
--Cocteau (1921)
Idea: that consciousness arises in those who are ON THE
EDGE--of cultures, races, classes, sexes, conditions,
sanity, history, places, etc--they have familiarity with two
different modes of being which prevents them from falling
into either conformity... Consciousness is nature healing
a split in humans.
The role of the artist has become untenable, just when the
myth of the artist has reached its furthest inflation. It is
time to say: Human is enough.
All day long we wear the face that monkeys reserve for
a lion about to eat them.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
"Thing 1"
Wrong cold word, baby--sands they ikon off like
A breeding streak unportrayable
Death, Spetznaz, kissing daylight
Then & grom sweeping
Smoulders harl
Viral oobleck cadavatar slag
Continuing briskly puree with flashbangs
The lethal
Iron evil a rodent:
Ned or alive have/.
10 26 03
[This poem, like others in the series, sort of asks to be
set to music; i imagine something austere, sprechstimme,
like "Pierrot Lunaire", with a cappella intervals... It's time, i
think, for Language Poetry to start aiming at radio airplay.]
'If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would still
distinguish them.' --Herakleitos
'It is through those who live in the present that the present
exists.' --Simone Weil
"I have always found Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the Only Wise; this they do with a confidant
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." --Blake
When everything's a symptom there's no way to change.
When everything's a cause there's no basis to decide. We
must straddle this dichotomy in order to be able to act.
Monism is achieved at the end of doing, and lasts for
one breath only. Then we start again.
The old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen
leaves with metal detectors. I don't want to be famous,
i just want not to have wasted my time.
Why 2 brains? --Why 2 hands?
"Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without
reason are mad." --Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind,
II (1980)
In broken times, to do one thing well is hard enough, and
seems sufficient. Though there are dreams of unification
they will also be broken; the system will be incomplete.
But people who are also broken cannot perceive this.
Wrong cold word, baby--sands they ikon off like
A breeding streak unportrayable
Death, Spetznaz, kissing daylight
Then & grom sweeping
Smoulders harl
Viral oobleck cadavatar slag
Continuing briskly puree with flashbangs
The lethal
Iron evil a rodent:
Ned or alive have/.
10 26 03
[This poem, like others in the series, sort of asks to be
set to music; i imagine something austere, sprechstimme,
like "Pierrot Lunaire", with a cappella intervals... It's time, i
think, for Language Poetry to start aiming at radio airplay.]
'If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would still
distinguish them.' --Herakleitos
'It is through those who live in the present that the present
exists.' --Simone Weil
"I have always found Angels have the vanity to speak of
themselves as the Only Wise; this they do with a confidant
insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." --Blake
When everything's a symptom there's no way to change.
When everything's a cause there's no basis to decide. We
must straddle this dichotomy in order to be able to act.
Monism is achieved at the end of doing, and lasts for
one breath only. Then we start again.
The old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen
leaves with metal detectors. I don't want to be famous,
i just want not to have wasted my time.
Why 2 brains? --Why 2 hands?
"Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without
reason are mad." --Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind,
II (1980)
In broken times, to do one thing well is hard enough, and
seems sufficient. Though there are dreams of unification
they will also be broken; the system will be incomplete.
But people who are also broken cannot perceive this.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
"I had a student once who was severely dyslectic. I loved her writing, though she had been made to feel ashamed of it. ‘She surfered with minstrel tramps.’ In that she felt oppressed by her condition, yet had to manifest it, I thought her poet-like. In that her errors troubled her, but were a welcome read for me, we were the ideal poet-and-reader combo.I would like to drive a larger wedge of the unconscious into poetry. After all, we all know what we know, and who cares? Without mistakes, there’d be no roast pork." --David Bromige, interview
"Ontology is the luxury of the landed." --Lisa
Robertson
Wonder what Bridget Riley's been doing lately?
"Ontology is the luxury of the landed." --Lisa
Robertson
Wonder what Bridget Riley's been doing lately?
My versions of "Roland the Headless..." & "Smells
Like Teen Spirit" belong to a little-known but
venerable tradition--filks.
Nano-Velcro is coming!
Listening to: Skinny Puppy.
Poets & employment. When i saw "American
Splendor", i felt an immediate shock of
recognition--that's how poets live!
Except, they don't ever get to be on David Letterman...
Are they still giving out the Templeton Prize?
Critics. A half-hour with Google has convinced me
George Saintsbury survives today only as the
author of a book on wine. Even the NeoFormalists
don't read him, alas. May i say only that he was
one of the most learned men of a time when
having read thousands of books was a prerequisite
for writing about them...?
Like Teen Spirit" belong to a little-known but
venerable tradition--filks.
Nano-Velcro is coming!
Listening to: Skinny Puppy.
Poets & employment. When i saw "American
Splendor", i felt an immediate shock of
recognition--that's how poets live!
Except, they don't ever get to be on David Letterman...
Are they still giving out the Templeton Prize?
Critics. A half-hour with Google has convinced me
George Saintsbury survives today only as the
author of a book on wine. Even the NeoFormalists
don't read him, alas. May i say only that he was
one of the most learned men of a time when
having read thousands of books was a prerequisite
for writing about them...?
"Previous to that period, we will be
engaging in a holy war against ourselves."
"Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry
All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall--
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.
If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing for me."
--R S Gwynn, in The Formalist #1 (1990)
What we all were waiting for--a negative review
of "Left Behind". (via Electrolite) More.
The Head of Vecna.
Kemetism.
engaging in a holy war against ourselves."
"Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses the Norton Anthology of Poetry
All human things are subject to decay.
Beauty is momentary in the mind.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
And somewhat of a sad perplexity.
Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell,
In a dark time the eye begins to see.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall--
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
What but design of darkness to appall?
An aged man is but a paltry thing.
If I should die, think only this of me:
Crass casualty obstructs the sun and rain
When I have fears that I may cease to be,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
And hear the spectral singing of the moon
And strictly meditate the thankless muse.
The world is too much with us, late and soon.
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.
Again he raised the jug up to the light:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Downward to darkness on extended wings,
Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
I do not think that they will sing for me."
--R S Gwynn, in The Formalist #1 (1990)
What we all were waiting for--a negative review
of "Left Behind". (via Electrolite) More.
The Head of Vecna.
Kemetism.
Friday, October 24, 2003
"One of the more striking statistics of 9-11 is that Concorde lost 40 of its frequent flyers." --Samizdata
Happy Coronal Mass Ejection!
"I'm not a haiku.
I have too many syllables
In my second line." --Superdeluxegoodpoems
Happy Coronal Mass Ejection!
"I'm not a haiku.
I have too many syllables
In my second line." --Superdeluxegoodpoems
To hear the Vietnam war in "Scarborough
Fair".
"Envoy of the Dog Star"
Kabul is a tempestuous yet strange things narrated-- it was now I, like earthquake victims waiting for this! You shall not bear the night. A whirlwind was now the image of darkness supervened; all was the dungeons there had I felt that my final and heat; yet all was not lost. Hardly a glimpse of horror and of trolley buses are stacked on top of death with contours of each other, reminiscent of weapon. They have no light and would have no light and heat; I had always been strange, with contours of weapon. I was blazing. And then came, a rope about the night. I might have no light and for this! I, with a modern fleet of the pock-marks of agony; their apocalyptic fires burn through the pock-marks of darkness supervened; but smile!
10 24 03
"Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than 'scoundrel' and 'blockhead.' "
--Macaulay
Listening to: Un Ballo in Maschera.
Fair".
"Envoy of the Dog Star"
Kabul is a tempestuous yet strange things narrated-- it was now I, like earthquake victims waiting for this! You shall not bear the night. A whirlwind was now the image of darkness supervened; all was the dungeons there had I felt that my final and heat; yet all was not lost. Hardly a glimpse of horror and of trolley buses are stacked on top of death with contours of each other, reminiscent of weapon. They have no light and would have no light and heat; I had always been strange, with contours of weapon. I was blazing. And then came, a rope about the night. I might have no light and for this! I, with a modern fleet of the pock-marks of agony; their apocalyptic fires burn through the pock-marks of darkness supervened; but smile!
10 24 03
"Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with something more convincing than 'scoundrel' and 'blockhead.' "
--Macaulay
Listening to: Un Ballo in Maschera.
Listening to: Shonen Knife.
The music of the "Russian Sailors' Dance" was
running through my head when suddenly i realized
i was simultaneously hearing the theme from "Davey
and Goliath"--they had four consecutive notes
in common. I was able to shift back & forth
between them at will. I dub this phenomenon
ambimelodism & note that, although i
sometimes discover it listening to one song or
another, there is nothing i can do to recognize
such overlappings in music i already know by
thinking back searchingly...
Imagine a reader who prefers "shannonized"
prose to that composed directly by humans,
which seems in comparison too banal & too
manipulative: well, that's kind of how i
feel about my preference for instrumentals
& songs in languages i don't know.
The music of the "Russian Sailors' Dance" was
running through my head when suddenly i realized
i was simultaneously hearing the theme from "Davey
and Goliath"--they had four consecutive notes
in common. I was able to shift back & forth
between them at will. I dub this phenomenon
ambimelodism & note that, although i
sometimes discover it listening to one song or
another, there is nothing i can do to recognize
such overlappings in music i already know by
thinking back searchingly...
Imagine a reader who prefers "shannonized"
prose to that composed directly by humans,
which seems in comparison too banal & too
manipulative: well, that's kind of how i
feel about my preference for instrumentals
& songs in languages i don't know.
Shannonizer. (via Pickover)
I shannonized the previous sonnet:
Skin is the courage to give, and blood, the species
of death; I started from dreams of The Answer must solace our lostness with that I saw them writhe with
a path. And then all is the Only Palimpsest Out of myrrh, melodious ulcer comes a hideous-- you could
have slept last I dared-- of the monster had always deemed them writhe with just such dreams of PERVERSENESS. This gift, like a path. with a way
where none may go, through the species of the last night. We carve passage in flames went utterly out;
I had the monster had always been strange things narrated-- and blood, and would have rid myself of
the deepest slumber-- fables I have had always been strange, through the hot breath of my proud, through the pit." (edited by Poe)
Verlan. (via Caterina)
In Search of the Authentic Other.
Excerpt from Hiroshima Notes.
Mark Twain: from Huckleberry Finn
"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnum Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knockings! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery--go!"
I shannonized the previous sonnet:
Skin is the courage to give, and blood, the species
of death; I started from dreams of The Answer must solace our lostness with that I saw them writhe with
a path. And then all is the Only Palimpsest Out of myrrh, melodious ulcer comes a hideous-- you could
have slept last I dared-- of the monster had always deemed them writhe with just such dreams of PERVERSENESS. This gift, like a path. with a way
where none may go, through the species of the last night. We carve passage in flames went utterly out;
I had the monster had always been strange things narrated-- and blood, and would have rid myself of
the deepest slumber-- fables I have had always been strange, through the hot breath of my proud, through the pit." (edited by Poe)
Verlan. (via Caterina)
In Search of the Authentic Other.
Excerpt from Hiroshima Notes.
Mark Twain: from Huckleberry Finn
"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnum Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knockings! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery--go!"
Thursday, October 23, 2003
"And while I alphabetize my collection the country is stolen."
--Equanimity
Jorg Buttgereit makes art movies--about
necrophilia.
An Inuit poet.
--Equanimity
Jorg Buttgereit makes art movies--about
necrophilia.
An Inuit poet.
from Fungoids:
"32. Skin is the Only Palimpsest
Out of my proud, hard, melodious ulcer
comes a dream too bitter to be angry,
too sad to be bitter. We dreamers cured of The Answer
must solace our lostness with the Double Ulgry.
This gift, perhaps the last I have to give,
savor of myrrh, orgeat, Chartreuse and blood,
golden at dawn a gossamer caryatid
(contrail or portent), Djuna--is my love.
You said, you could have slept last night in my arms;
I wanted that, too. I wanted, beyond reprieve,
a knowledge that was also a path. We carve
passage in the dark with just such dreams:
a way where none may go, we go. Though not to leave."
"The U.S. doesn't trust Iraqis to even
act as cleaners, and so South Asian and
Filipino migrants are being used." --Tariq
Ali in Counterpunch
"I remember an early seventies story bruit'd
about by who knows who: that Rod McKuen published other poems under an other name, and those poems
were thought terrific by those critics that barely had the decency to humour along the Rod McKuen we thought we knew." --Hotel Point
Dalit Literature.
A Kyrghyz poet.
An Uzbek poet.
Linguistic Iconism links.
"32. Skin is the Only Palimpsest
Out of my proud, hard, melodious ulcer
comes a dream too bitter to be angry,
too sad to be bitter. We dreamers cured of The Answer
must solace our lostness with the Double Ulgry.
This gift, perhaps the last I have to give,
savor of myrrh, orgeat, Chartreuse and blood,
golden at dawn a gossamer caryatid
(contrail or portent), Djuna--is my love.
You said, you could have slept last night in my arms;
I wanted that, too. I wanted, beyond reprieve,
a knowledge that was also a path. We carve
passage in the dark with just such dreams:
a way where none may go, we go. Though not to leave."
"The U.S. doesn't trust Iraqis to even
act as cleaners, and so South Asian and
Filipino migrants are being used." --Tariq
Ali in Counterpunch
"I remember an early seventies story bruit'd
about by who knows who: that Rod McKuen published other poems under an other name, and those poems
were thought terrific by those critics that barely had the decency to humour along the Rod McKuen we thought we knew." --Hotel Point
Dalit Literature.
A Kyrghyz poet.
An Uzbek poet.
Linguistic Iconism links.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
"In the Croatian capital Zagreb there arose a
debate on the palindrome's meaning as a symbol
of cross-cultural interaction referring to the
two dialects involved in the Serbo-Croatian language,
one argument being that palindromic devices are in
fact two-faced speech and represent an illusionary
and utopian pseudo-monolingualism, and an opposite
argument that palindrome poetry might symbolically
keep up the promise of dialogue and double-/pluri-
vocal coexistence in a once multicultural context
(Dubravka Oraic -Toli Oraic: Palindromska apokalipsa,
1992/1993; Dubravka Ugresic, Die Kultur der Lüge,
1995)." --Erika Greber
debate on the palindrome's meaning as a symbol
of cross-cultural interaction referring to the
two dialects involved in the Serbo-Croatian language,
one argument being that palindromic devices are in
fact two-faced speech and represent an illusionary
and utopian pseudo-monolingualism, and an opposite
argument that palindrome poetry might symbolically
keep up the promise of dialogue and double-/pluri-
vocal coexistence in a once multicultural context
(Dubravka Oraic -Toli Oraic: Palindromska apokalipsa,
1992/1993; Dubravka Ugresic, Die Kultur der Lüge,
1995)." --Erika Greber
In debt? Sell a kidney.
"President Bush stopped in Manila on Saturday to
speak to the Philippine Congress. The speech was
warmly received, though some eyebrows lifted when
he said, 'America is proud of its part in the great
story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers
liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.' "
(from the Washington Post, via The Agonist)
"President Bush stopped in Manila on Saturday to
speak to the Philippine Congress. The speech was
warmly received, though some eyebrows lifted when
he said, 'America is proud of its part in the great
story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers
liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.' "
(from the Washington Post, via The Agonist)
New Byrd. It just gives me a kick that stuff
like this is going down on the Congressional
Record; it's not like it makes me feel any
less guilty for using 500 gallons of gas a
year.
The Guardian has started a US Elections weblog.
More on Enoch Soames.
"Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign." --Ursula LeGuin (via
Wood_s Lot)
Submit to Sleeping Fish. (via Craig Hill)
In the future, we will fight wars over water.
like this is going down on the Congressional
Record; it's not like it makes me feel any
less guilty for using 500 gallons of gas a
year.
The Guardian has started a US Elections weblog.
More on Enoch Soames.
"Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign." --Ursula LeGuin (via
Wood_s Lot)
Submit to Sleeping Fish. (via Craig Hill)
In the future, we will fight wars over water.
For him the avant garde myth of origins was
like the Wiccan one--it symbolically represents
a basic orientation that is correct, without
being literally true. Interestingly, all the
other poetry factions share the same myth (only
the names are changed), which is Romanticism's
--a triumphant movement if there ever was one--
that can only conceive of itself in terms of
the underdog. The rare few poets i know who
have pursued careerist goals, via the university
system or else the slam network--have not really
had to compromise their integrity, as in the myth.
What actually happened, it seems to me, is they
chose their totems already, & either system was
able to accommodate them: these were personal,
not ideological networks. Likewise, publishing.
But what confuses people is when you do not
subscribe to literary totemism per se--you will
only be perceived in terms of your fit to the
existing paradigms. Perhaps it is just as well
to proclaim oneself under the totem of the
trickster.
The poem in the air, the poem on the page:
motile & sessile forms of life.
Listening to: The First Philadelphia Computer
Music Festival.
like the Wiccan one--it symbolically represents
a basic orientation that is correct, without
being literally true. Interestingly, all the
other poetry factions share the same myth (only
the names are changed), which is Romanticism's
--a triumphant movement if there ever was one--
that can only conceive of itself in terms of
the underdog. The rare few poets i know who
have pursued careerist goals, via the university
system or else the slam network--have not really
had to compromise their integrity, as in the myth.
What actually happened, it seems to me, is they
chose their totems already, & either system was
able to accommodate them: these were personal,
not ideological networks. Likewise, publishing.
But what confuses people is when you do not
subscribe to literary totemism per se--you will
only be perceived in terms of your fit to the
existing paradigms. Perhaps it is just as well
to proclaim oneself under the totem of the
trickster.
The poem in the air, the poem on the page:
motile & sessile forms of life.
Listening to: The First Philadelphia Computer
Music Festival.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
"The Choke"
To styptic mulct torque
The rustle of the cryptic
Pungent ballasted synthespian wheedle
For Spetznaz then. What ominous woe
I welcomed
Puree & round about it
Mouldering rubbish lay the misbelieving
Multitudes perform grow??. HMO
For torture doctors
Decaf land
Chrome squirm Scully Did?
10 20 03
My book "Fungoids" is part of a three-pronged
effort i made a couple years back to get my
publishing thing going; i went through all my old
poems, & selected a volume of Neoformalist
Verse, a volume of Language Poetry, & a volume
of Free Verse (having decided that no publisher
was ever going to touch a manuscript mixed
together the way i'd been doing it). This Pessoa-
like expedient, however, has not quite borne
fruit the way i intended so now, having pretty
much exhausted the outlets for the Neoformalist
book, i am trying it out with a print-on-demand
online publisher. (I still have hopes for the other
two.) --The title, of course, is the fictitious
second book of Max Beerbohm's invented poet
"Enoch Soames". I hope my poems included
therein do not disgrace his memory...
To styptic mulct torque
The rustle of the cryptic
Pungent ballasted synthespian wheedle
For Spetznaz then. What ominous woe
I welcomed
Puree & round about it
Mouldering rubbish lay the misbelieving
Multitudes perform grow??. HMO
For torture doctors
Decaf land
Chrome squirm Scully Did?
10 20 03
My book "Fungoids" is part of a three-pronged
effort i made a couple years back to get my
publishing thing going; i went through all my old
poems, & selected a volume of Neoformalist
Verse, a volume of Language Poetry, & a volume
of Free Verse (having decided that no publisher
was ever going to touch a manuscript mixed
together the way i'd been doing it). This Pessoa-
like expedient, however, has not quite borne
fruit the way i intended so now, having pretty
much exhausted the outlets for the Neoformalist
book, i am trying it out with a print-on-demand
online publisher. (I still have hopes for the other
two.) --The title, of course, is the fictitious
second book of Max Beerbohm's invented poet
"Enoch Soames". I hope my poems included
therein do not disgrace his memory...
Monday, October 20, 2003
A Goth art-car. (via memepool)
"If in the future we have the development
of a fairly broad counter-sphere of
heteronymous practices that begin to freely
circulate alongside the habitual province of
'empirical' and genetic ascription --a kind
of parallel poetic economy, if you will, one
not beholden to the relations of production
and exchange of the official literary culture--
then I think Motokiyu's work* will be seen as
having made an important contribution." --Kent
Johnson
[I tend to agree; there is a very interesting
dialectic possible between the poetry of "identity"/
"authenticity" & poetries of "mask" & "hoax"...If
one wishes to give a name to this dialectic, i
suggest that "Baconian Shakespeare" sums up
its challenges & rewards.] [More.]
Listening to: Gliere-"Russian Sailors' Dance", from
The Red Poppy [One of the most haunting
melodies in classical music, this had been familiar
to me from cartoon childhood, but i never knew
its composer or the name of it until recently.]
-------------------------------------------
*referring to the hoax-book Doubled Flowering:
From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
"If in the future we have the development
of a fairly broad counter-sphere of
heteronymous practices that begin to freely
circulate alongside the habitual province of
'empirical' and genetic ascription --a kind
of parallel poetic economy, if you will, one
not beholden to the relations of production
and exchange of the official literary culture--
then I think Motokiyu's work* will be seen as
having made an important contribution." --Kent
Johnson
[I tend to agree; there is a very interesting
dialectic possible between the poetry of "identity"/
"authenticity" & poetries of "mask" & "hoax"...If
one wishes to give a name to this dialectic, i
suggest that "Baconian Shakespeare" sums up
its challenges & rewards.] [More.]
Listening to: Gliere-"Russian Sailors' Dance", from
The Red Poppy [One of the most haunting
melodies in classical music, this had been familiar
to me from cartoon childhood, but i never knew
its composer or the name of it until recently.]
-------------------------------------------
*referring to the hoax-book Doubled Flowering:
From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
Saturday, October 18, 2003
"...A thousand pilgrims strain
Arm, shoulder, breast and thigh, with might and main,
To drag that sacred wain,
And scarce can draw along the enormous load.
Prone falls the frantic votaries in its road,
And calling on the God,
Their self-devoted bodies there they lay
To pave his chariot-way.
On Jaga-Naut they call,
The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all.
Through flesh and bone it ploughs its dreadful path.
Groans rise unheard: the dying cry,
And death and agony
Are trodden underfoot by yon mad throng,
Who follow close, and thrust the deadly wheels along."
--Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810)
"Outsourced Epic"
This stain will not rinse out, though years may try;
Stained is our flag, our hands, & eke our art.
Like ranked sleepwalkers marching we charged the cliff,
And too much broken crowns the catafalque.
Daily i hear a tide turning, gladly i hear
Speech restored, & yet we are still astray
In a cloud that's drastic dark; & we have burned
Wheatfields of choices to play the fate-denier.
10 16 03
"Sleep in the Mojave Desert
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.
I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away."
--Sylvia Plath
Listening to: Wolff & Hennings- Tibetan Bells (1971)
Arm, shoulder, breast and thigh, with might and main,
To drag that sacred wain,
And scarce can draw along the enormous load.
Prone falls the frantic votaries in its road,
And calling on the God,
Their self-devoted bodies there they lay
To pave his chariot-way.
On Jaga-Naut they call,
The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all.
Through flesh and bone it ploughs its dreadful path.
Groans rise unheard: the dying cry,
And death and agony
Are trodden underfoot by yon mad throng,
Who follow close, and thrust the deadly wheels along."
--Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810)
"Outsourced Epic"
This stain will not rinse out, though years may try;
Stained is our flag, our hands, & eke our art.
Like ranked sleepwalkers marching we charged the cliff,
And too much broken crowns the catafalque.
Daily i hear a tide turning, gladly i hear
Speech restored, & yet we are still astray
In a cloud that's drastic dark; & we have burned
Wheatfields of choices to play the fate-denier.
10 16 03
"Sleep in the Mojave Desert
Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind's eye erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit these leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.
I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart's droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man's eye,
Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird
Doze behind the old maskss of fury.
We swelter like firedogs in the wind.
The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie
The heat-cracked crickets congregate
In their black armorplate and cry.
The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,
And the crickets come creeping into our hair
To fiddle the short night away."
--Sylvia Plath
Listening to: Wolff & Hennings- Tibetan Bells (1971)
Friday, October 17, 2003
Announcing the publication of a new book
of selected poems in verse by Michael Helsem,
Fungoids, available for $9.60 from:
http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern
or by clicking on "tie-ins" from my blog.
(Some of these poems have been published
in previous chapbooks, but not many of
them.)
Listening to: Trout Mask Replica.
Apparently i'm not the first painter to be influenced
by Elephant Art.
Nor is the new Mel Gibson movie the only
one that was made in Aramaic.
of selected poems in verse by Michael Helsem,
Fungoids, available for $9.60 from:
http://www.cafeshops.com/graywyvern
or by clicking on "tie-ins" from my blog.
(Some of these poems have been published
in previous chapbooks, but not many of
them.)
Listening to: Trout Mask Replica.
Apparently i'm not the first painter to be influenced
by Elephant Art.
Nor is the new Mel Gibson movie the only
one that was made in Aramaic.
"There are miracles nobody survives." --Bill Knott, Becos
(1983)
"How is it I'm so exhausted by what I once believed that
the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison
was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the
art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity
died immediately, without protest." --Steve Erickson, Rubicon
Beach (1986)
'The difference between us and the Etruscans...is the following:
whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the
collision of clouds, they believe clouds collide so as to release
lightning.' --Seneca, Quaestiones naturales II.32.2, in: Rika
Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
"But it was also Auden who, later in his life, told a friend that
he had never understood a word Ashbery had written." -- J D
McClatchy, White Paper (1989)
"Until well into the Middle Ages the relative values of the two noble
metals [gold & silver] was determined by the relationship of the
rotation times of the two heavenly bodies [the Sun & Moon]."
--Titus Burckhardt
"Snow
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs. '
--Charles Wright
Someone i knew asked me last night if i was going to
read; i said i thought not, "--my old poems bore me & my
new ones are no good." I should stay home when i'm in that
kind of mood. It's like having the tigers in your circus act
turn on you--better in solitude, than with an audience & the
lights.
"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott
"Still ist sein Zeichen
Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet darunter
Sein Leben lang." --Holderlin ('In the thundering sky/
His sign is silent. And one/ Stands underneath it all/
His life long.')
Good novelists can describe personality types so exactly
i can recognize them. Does this prove typology is real,
or unnecessary?
Ego is a theory of the introvert in isolation, the extravert
in conflict.
Possession by the Shadow: the desire to punish; the Avenger.
Identification with the Shadow: the Anti-Hero; the Condemned
One. Both are wrong. You must affirm the midpoint of
balance...
"...We are alone
until the times change
and those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
and call the darkness poetry" --Leonard Cohen
(1983)
"How is it I'm so exhausted by what I once believed that
the things I love affront me with the effort to love them. Prison
was a good place to be tired. There I taught my conscience the
art of fatigue, as a consequence of which passion and integrity
died immediately, without protest." --Steve Erickson, Rubicon
Beach (1986)
'The difference between us and the Etruscans...is the following:
whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the
collision of clouds, they believe clouds collide so as to release
lightning.' --Seneca, Quaestiones naturales II.32.2, in: Rika
Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
"But it was also Auden who, later in his life, told a friend that
he had never understood a word Ashbery had written." -- J D
McClatchy, White Paper (1989)
"Until well into the Middle Ages the relative values of the two noble
metals [gold & silver] was determined by the relationship of the
rotation times of the two heavenly bodies [the Sun & Moon]."
--Titus Burckhardt
"Snow
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and slip
Through the spiked branches and snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs. '
--Charles Wright
Someone i knew asked me last night if i was going to
read; i said i thought not, "--my old poems bore me & my
new ones are no good." I should stay home when i'm in that
kind of mood. It's like having the tigers in your circus act
turn on you--better in solitude, than with an audience & the
lights.
"pain passes for sunlight at some depths" --Bill Knott
"Still ist sein Zeichen
Am donnernden Himmel. Und Einer stehet darunter
Sein Leben lang." --Holderlin ('In the thundering sky/
His sign is silent. And one/ Stands underneath it all/
His life long.')
Good novelists can describe personality types so exactly
i can recognize them. Does this prove typology is real,
or unnecessary?
Ego is a theory of the introvert in isolation, the extravert
in conflict.
Possession by the Shadow: the desire to punish; the Avenger.
Identification with the Shadow: the Anti-Hero; the Condemned
One. Both are wrong. You must affirm the midpoint of
balance...
"...We are alone
until the times change
and those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
and call the darkness poetry" --Leonard Cohen
Thursday, October 16, 2003
"Haiku, Short Verse, and French Poets", a
lecture by Yves Bonnefoy. (suggested by an entry at
Language Hat)
Bonnefoy, in turn, led me to Paul-Jean Toulet;
i found a few of his poems translated here.
lecture by Yves Bonnefoy. (suggested by an entry at
Language Hat)
Bonnefoy, in turn, led me to Paul-Jean Toulet;
i found a few of his poems translated here.
...Robinson Jeffers's Medea...sort of like Howl
redone by Webster or Tourneur... I was able to understand
a little of the mental state of Plath's last days, when I realized
her emotional situation was exactly analogous to Medea's....
G--- the Communist called, too... As usual I waffled out. He
did say something which stuck in my mind: "Don't let that
illegitimist night get you down." I realized my position vis-Ã -vis
the Party has been (sometimes) like those 19c. dandies who
sort of maintained an aesthetic interest in Catholicism, without
ever managing to summon enough faith to want to join.
"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only
expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light
of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the
world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely
a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed,
the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw,
with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly,
because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her
by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she
knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book
he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his
talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had
been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things
dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep." --James Baldwin,
Another Country (1962)
"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be,
forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination
does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown
precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a
mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."
--ibid
My religious roots are not so much in Christianity as in Rock--
& only the corruption of the latter fills me with a sense of betrayal.
A poem is a bug like a cricket.
redone by Webster or Tourneur... I was able to understand
a little of the mental state of Plath's last days, when I realized
her emotional situation was exactly analogous to Medea's....
G--- the Communist called, too... As usual I waffled out. He
did say something which stuck in my mind: "Don't let that
illegitimist night get you down." I realized my position vis-Ã -vis
the Party has been (sometimes) like those 19c. dandies who
sort of maintained an aesthetic interest in Catholicism, without
ever managing to summon enough faith to want to join.
"Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only
expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light
of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the
world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely
a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed,
the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw,
with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly,
because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her
by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she
knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book
he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his
talent. It had not really been written to make money--if only it had
been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things
dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep." --James Baldwin,
Another Country (1962)
"He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be,
forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any
stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination
does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown
precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a
mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment."
--ibid
My religious roots are not so much in Christianity as in Rock--
& only the corruption of the latter fills me with a sense of betrayal.
A poem is a bug like a cricket.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
"True Jesus Bullet Train"
Sip wine like rain
Cadmium Proxima
Whisper bright
Crinolines perturb
Comes the god
Creeping indigo
Comes the rain
Fragile athanor
Proxima
In a flaking mask
10 14 03
Another "100 novels" list.
Republican congressmen can go to Iraq, but
not Democrats. (via Eschaton)
Sip wine like rain
Cadmium Proxima
Whisper bright
Crinolines perturb
Comes the god
Creeping indigo
Comes the rain
Fragile athanor
Proxima
In a flaking mask
10 14 03
Another "100 novels" list.
Republican congressmen can go to Iraq, but
not Democrats. (via Eschaton)
Happened to be at a friend's house, & what do
i see? "Davey and Goliath" on DVD! I remember
watching this when i was growing up. I was
fascinated by the ambiguity between living
& nonliving that this illusion created. --A similar
ambiguity, IMHO, drives the better part of
experimental poetry: except that it's
between referential & nonreferential. But
what i can't understand, is why not all poets
(much less, all readers) are as fascinated by
this as myself...
Kawaii links. (via Metafilter) --Something else
that our poetry has mostly failed to come to
grips with. (We're still hung up on "outlaw-
manners"-as-signifier-of-authenticity.)
Arabic terms. hikoomet dhill- shadow
government. (via Baghdad Burning)
i see? "Davey and Goliath" on DVD! I remember
watching this when i was growing up. I was
fascinated by the ambiguity between living
& nonliving that this illusion created. --A similar
ambiguity, IMHO, drives the better part of
experimental poetry: except that it's
between referential & nonreferential. But
what i can't understand, is why not all poets
(much less, all readers) are as fascinated by
this as myself...
Kawaii links. (via Metafilter) --Something else
that our poetry has mostly failed to come to
grips with. (We're still hung up on "outlaw-
manners"-as-signifier-of-authenticity.)
Arabic terms. hikoomet dhill- shadow
government. (via Baghdad Burning)
This maze made of confusion, a thousand casual lapses.
Damnation--of the flaccid grip.
'I honour you in dread
Since your voice like a soft vapour laps me
and my eyes, offered to the eternal scythe,
dare for you to contemplate the coffin;
since to me your red sanctuary affords
a joy half chill, half cardinalate, before
the posthumous avalanche weeps upon the vane;
since the bold cervix of the ardent skeleton,
predestined to the brand of the funeral
walnut, has hurled for you defiance to Death;
I honour you in dread of a lost alcove,
necromantic, with your rigid face
ecstatic, on a shin, as on a pillow;
and since you are my blood's harmonious chosen,
Amada, and life's convulsions seem a bridge
above an abyss, on which we tread together,
my kisses scour you devoutly serried
over a sacrilegious cloak of skulls
as over an erotic domino.'
--Ramon Lopez Velarde (1888-1921), in: Octavio Paz's
anthology Mexican Poetry
'Ants
To warm life passing singing with the grace
of a woman without wile or veil,
to unconquered beauty, enamouring, saving,
responds, amid the magic hour's elation,
a rancour of ants in my voracious veins.
The pit of silence and the swarm of sound,
the flour cloven like a double trophy
on fertile busts, the Hell of my belief,
the rattle of death and prelude to the nest,
chastise the ceaseless truant formication.
But soon my ants will deny me their embrace
and from my poor and diligent fingers fly
as a cold bagasse is forgotten on the sand;
and your mouth, cypher of erotic prowess,
your mouth that is my rubric, food, adornment,
your mouth that in its flaunting tongue vibrates
like a reprobate flame escaping from a kiln
into a throng of bitter howling gales
where the moon prowls intent to ravish you,
your mouth will smell of shroud and crushed grass,
of opiate and respond, wick and wax.
Before my ants abandon me, Amada,
let them journey the journey of your mouth
to gorge viatica of the sanguinary fruit
provoking me from Saracen oases.
Before your lips die for my sorrow give
them to me on the graveyard's critical threshold,
their bread and perfume, venom and cautery.'
--ibid
[RLV is my favorite Spanish-language poet.]
"I...did not stop to think whether the verses...would find a
reader. Nor have I ever considered whether they deserved
to find one." --Jeffers
"More common than the flarfer working a day job
in a marketing agency in Manhattan is the central
Asian nomad." --Silliman's Blog
Damnation--of the flaccid grip.
'I honour you in dread
Since your voice like a soft vapour laps me
and my eyes, offered to the eternal scythe,
dare for you to contemplate the coffin;
since to me your red sanctuary affords
a joy half chill, half cardinalate, before
the posthumous avalanche weeps upon the vane;
since the bold cervix of the ardent skeleton,
predestined to the brand of the funeral
walnut, has hurled for you defiance to Death;
I honour you in dread of a lost alcove,
necromantic, with your rigid face
ecstatic, on a shin, as on a pillow;
and since you are my blood's harmonious chosen,
Amada, and life's convulsions seem a bridge
above an abyss, on which we tread together,
my kisses scour you devoutly serried
over a sacrilegious cloak of skulls
as over an erotic domino.'
--Ramon Lopez Velarde (1888-1921), in: Octavio Paz's
anthology Mexican Poetry
'Ants
To warm life passing singing with the grace
of a woman without wile or veil,
to unconquered beauty, enamouring, saving,
responds, amid the magic hour's elation,
a rancour of ants in my voracious veins.
The pit of silence and the swarm of sound,
the flour cloven like a double trophy
on fertile busts, the Hell of my belief,
the rattle of death and prelude to the nest,
chastise the ceaseless truant formication.
But soon my ants will deny me their embrace
and from my poor and diligent fingers fly
as a cold bagasse is forgotten on the sand;
and your mouth, cypher of erotic prowess,
your mouth that is my rubric, food, adornment,
your mouth that in its flaunting tongue vibrates
like a reprobate flame escaping from a kiln
into a throng of bitter howling gales
where the moon prowls intent to ravish you,
your mouth will smell of shroud and crushed grass,
of opiate and respond, wick and wax.
Before my ants abandon me, Amada,
let them journey the journey of your mouth
to gorge viatica of the sanguinary fruit
provoking me from Saracen oases.
Before your lips die for my sorrow give
them to me on the graveyard's critical threshold,
their bread and perfume, venom and cautery.'
--ibid
[RLV is my favorite Spanish-language poet.]
"I...did not stop to think whether the verses...would find a
reader. Nor have I ever considered whether they deserved
to find one." --Jeffers
"More common than the flarfer working a day job
in a marketing agency in Manhattan is the central
Asian nomad." --Silliman's Blog
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
How do you know you're in a Mystery: it codifies your
experiences.
'But there are excavations of excavations.' --The Book of
Concealed Mystery (Mathers tr)
"One must sense the dark is occupied." --Jeffrey Gburek.
"Wittgenstein said of his [Trakl's] poems: 'I do not under-
stand them, but their tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.' " --Selected Poems ed C Middleton*
Alternative self-histories are more futile than most.
"Spinnen suchen mein Herz." ('Spiders look for my heart.')
--Trakl
"Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can
do: but this turns out to be something which not many people
want done." --C S Lewis
"I'm wearing/ windows for walls,/ and the street keeps coming
through." --Michelle Shocked, "Disoriented" (from her hard-to-find
EP)
'Casida of the Rose
The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderland of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.' --Lorca (tr Bly)
Contraries: truth & Mystery. Their opposites: lies &
banality.
Banality--a cancer with its own health & its own antibodies.
What techniques are to problems, initiations are to
Mysteries.
I like a cop car parked beside me. I don't like a cop car
driving beside me.
Holidays spread, like a stain, into whole seasons.
'181. [A veces, siento]
At times I feel
like the rose
that I shall be, like the wing
that I shall be;
and a perfume shrouds me, alien and mine,
mine and a rose's;
and a wanderlust grips me, alien and mine,
mine and a bird's.'
--tr Eloise Roach, Juan Ramon Jiménez Three Hundred Poems
1903-1953
--------------------------------------------------------
* "A Waltz in Old Vienna"
Once Wittgenstein gifted Georg Trakl
Though quipping, "His verse boasts a lock'll
Withstand the best key;
It's yet poetry."
And Trakl pushed back his debacle.
4-13-01
experiences.
'But there are excavations of excavations.' --The Book of
Concealed Mystery (Mathers tr)
"One must sense the dark is occupied." --Jeffrey Gburek.
"Wittgenstein said of his [Trakl's] poems: 'I do not under-
stand them, but their tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.' " --Selected Poems ed C Middleton*
Alternative self-histories are more futile than most.
"Spinnen suchen mein Herz." ('Spiders look for my heart.')
--Trakl
"Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can
do: but this turns out to be something which not many people
want done." --C S Lewis
"I'm wearing/ windows for walls,/ and the street keeps coming
through." --Michelle Shocked, "Disoriented" (from her hard-to-find
EP)
'Casida of the Rose
The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderland of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.' --Lorca (tr Bly)
Contraries: truth & Mystery. Their opposites: lies &
banality.
Banality--a cancer with its own health & its own antibodies.
What techniques are to problems, initiations are to
Mysteries.
I like a cop car parked beside me. I don't like a cop car
driving beside me.
Holidays spread, like a stain, into whole seasons.
'181. [A veces, siento]
At times I feel
like the rose
that I shall be, like the wing
that I shall be;
and a perfume shrouds me, alien and mine,
mine and a rose's;
and a wanderlust grips me, alien and mine,
mine and a bird's.'
--tr Eloise Roach, Juan Ramon Jiménez Three Hundred Poems
1903-1953
--------------------------------------------------------
* "A Waltz in Old Vienna"
Once Wittgenstein gifted Georg Trakl
Though quipping, "His verse boasts a lock'll
Withstand the best key;
It's yet poetry."
And Trakl pushed back his debacle.
4-13-01
Monday, October 13, 2003
Interesting set of "France-in-a-nutshell"
pages i found while looking for mot de
Cambronne; here's a word (& an attitude)
we need: laicite'.
The Rats of Alpha Centauri.
Listening to: Dead Can Dance- Into the Labyrinth.
New French observations of Alpha Centauri
make it almost the same age as the Sun,
instead of a couple of billion years older
as previously thought.
Waiting for the Taikonauts.
You can find a David Hardy painting of "Proxima's
Planet" (which is now not thought to exist)*--here.
Clicking on his name leads to a small site for the
great space artist himself...
Clicking on this, however, takes you to a site
about "diapered furries", & if you have to ask,
you don't want to know.
-----------------------------------------------------------
*but you can still sing the song. (How appropriate--
Black Metal about a Ghost Planet.)
A somewhat more lyrical picture of the star.
--Curiously, though the "planet" would have orbited at
about Venus's distance, because of the smaller mass of
Proxima its revolution period would be more like 600
days. [And if you reduce the mass of Proxima to
something like 8.9% of the Sun's--not at all an
unlikely number--it produces a revolution period of
666 days...]
pages i found while looking for mot de
Cambronne; here's a word (& an attitude)
we need: laicite'.
The Rats of Alpha Centauri.
Listening to: Dead Can Dance- Into the Labyrinth.
New French observations of Alpha Centauri
make it almost the same age as the Sun,
instead of a couple of billion years older
as previously thought.
Waiting for the Taikonauts.
You can find a David Hardy painting of "Proxima's
Planet" (which is now not thought to exist)*--here.
Clicking on his name leads to a small site for the
great space artist himself...
Clicking on this, however, takes you to a site
about "diapered furries", & if you have to ask,
you don't want to know.
-----------------------------------------------------------
*but you can still sing the song. (How appropriate--
Black Metal about a Ghost Planet.)
A somewhat more lyrical picture of the star.
--Curiously, though the "planet" would have orbited at
about Venus's distance, because of the smaller mass of
Proxima its revolution period would be more like 600
days. [And if you reduce the mass of Proxima to
something like 8.9% of the Sun's--not at all an
unlikely number--it produces a revolution period of
666 days...]
Best montage. Melanie reminded me of
the one in "Grace of My Heart" where they intercut
the song being written, what prompted the song,
& the song being recorded , for "Unwanted Number".
Extraordinary!
In an alternate universe... (via Buzz Flash)
Got a letter from someone who used to be
a poetry publisher & now runs the "Ganjah
Baptist Church of America". (It's about what
you'd think from the name.) Me, i'm waiting
for the Ganja Pentecostalists.
"Nightly Phone-Charging Ritual"
Nebulize the wrixled mortal day
Loin railgun bible
Dogging... Flowers of evil for Algernon
Waihopai viridian
Sleep mimics
Immensely climbs dictated
Slag off is
The fury of the matador we
Indigo fraud lurch
The big bad ballasted oblong sprockets stilb
Flaking squib bullion
Elephantine froglegs illegible bleed
Stilb silver
Alcove under crinoline take. Call
Back facets
Pungent equivalence: love
Buttercup
Luster annihilation
10 13 03
"This evening, to London for a party to celebrate 40 years
of the NYRB. All the usual suspects were there; I talked to
a former colleague about the war. 'They did have the most
extraordinary hubris about the power of their army', he said:
'I was talking to Dick Cheney in December last year, and I
asked him, how did he see the war on terror ending. He said-
"with the elimination of all the terrorists"!' We looked at
each other with complete British understanding, and both
thought of the Duke of Wellington. 'They may not frighten the
enemy', I said, 'But, damme, sir, they frighten me!' he finished."
Then he said that the man to quote now, six months into the
occupation, was Kipling: 'We have had no end of a lesson and it has done us no end of good.' "--Andrew Brown
the one in "Grace of My Heart" where they intercut
the song being written, what prompted the song,
& the song being recorded , for "Unwanted Number".
Extraordinary!
In an alternate universe... (via Buzz Flash)
Got a letter from someone who used to be
a poetry publisher & now runs the "Ganjah
Baptist Church of America". (It's about what
you'd think from the name.) Me, i'm waiting
for the Ganja Pentecostalists.
"Nightly Phone-Charging Ritual"
Nebulize the wrixled mortal day
Loin railgun bible
Dogging... Flowers of evil for Algernon
Waihopai viridian
Sleep mimics
Immensely climbs dictated
Slag off is
The fury of the matador we
Indigo fraud lurch
The big bad ballasted oblong sprockets stilb
Flaking squib bullion
Elephantine froglegs illegible bleed
Stilb silver
Alcove under crinoline take. Call
Back facets
Pungent equivalence: love
Buttercup
Luster annihilation
10 13 03
"This evening, to London for a party to celebrate 40 years
of the NYRB. All the usual suspects were there; I talked to
a former colleague about the war. 'They did have the most
extraordinary hubris about the power of their army', he said:
'I was talking to Dick Cheney in December last year, and I
asked him, how did he see the war on terror ending. He said-
"with the elimination of all the terrorists"!' We looked at
each other with complete British understanding, and both
thought of the Duke of Wellington. 'They may not frighten the
enemy', I said, 'But, damme, sir, they frighten me!' he finished."
Then he said that the man to quote now, six months into the
occupation, was Kipling: 'We have had no end of a lesson and it has done us no end of good.' "--Andrew Brown
Ego as a lawnmower engine each of us carries on our
backs from birth. The noise, the stinks which obscure
our selfhood. And some have engines so large, whole
nations are required to hold them up... And we think we'd
die without them.
'Largeness is the mortal enemy of the infinite.' --Henri Michaux, The Turbulent Infinite
All poetry readings should be held by candlelight; it activates
a deeper level of listening than fluorescent.
"on rune-height by the garbaged rill
the scree-fall answers the cawed madrigals"
--The Anathemata
"To a poet, nothing can be useless." --Rasselas
'Do you fall Elevator?
Do you fall elevator? Where? In
the hottest waiting room
a rattlesnake creeps
along a crack. And hisses.
So do I know that the Earth,
littered with bark and gnarls,
is a truly worm-eaten tree.
Oh, all of you above ground,
who doubt with Thomas,
saw the earth through
and be convinced.' --Kristinn Reyr, in: The Post-War
Poetry of Iceland tr S Magnusson (1982)
"by the brumous numen drawn on" --The Anathemata
"All of physics and chemistry is in a candle flame." --Michael Faraday
...Dr Krasinski's Secret by M P Shiel--sorta like Robert Louis
Stevenson on acid.
...[I] use my [chap-] book as if it were a hologram calling-card
of the real me...
Hearts & minds.
backs from birth. The noise, the stinks which obscure
our selfhood. And some have engines so large, whole
nations are required to hold them up... And we think we'd
die without them.
'Largeness is the mortal enemy of the infinite.' --Henri Michaux, The Turbulent Infinite
All poetry readings should be held by candlelight; it activates
a deeper level of listening than fluorescent.
"on rune-height by the garbaged rill
the scree-fall answers the cawed madrigals"
--The Anathemata
"To a poet, nothing can be useless." --Rasselas
'Do you fall Elevator?
Do you fall elevator? Where? In
the hottest waiting room
a rattlesnake creeps
along a crack. And hisses.
So do I know that the Earth,
littered with bark and gnarls,
is a truly worm-eaten tree.
Oh, all of you above ground,
who doubt with Thomas,
saw the earth through
and be convinced.' --Kristinn Reyr, in: The Post-War
Poetry of Iceland tr S Magnusson (1982)
"by the brumous numen drawn on" --The Anathemata
"All of physics and chemistry is in a candle flame." --Michael Faraday
...Dr Krasinski's Secret by M P Shiel--sorta like Robert Louis
Stevenson on acid.
...[I] use my [chap-] book as if it were a hologram calling-card
of the real me...
Hearts & minds.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
Surely the greatest hindrance to human freedom
is the fact that not everyone wants it, needs it, or
knows what it is when they have it... But if i contemplate
this too long, i become speechless.
I'll side with any libel at 2 p.m.
Even so in significant an object as a paperclip, i cannot
help but regard with the same insistent awe that a preindustrial
human would at its precision of form & absolute symmetry.
"Dry facts, like biscuits..." --Sacheverell Sitwell
"...warring dualities..." --Ruth Pitter
Poets can still feel like they're taking part in a grand collective
enterprise: the denial of our extremity.
...the Albigensian Crusade (which would have discredited the
Christian Church forever if men had memories)...
"...why should the gracious fountain of life give us passions,
and the power of reflecting, only to imbitter our days and inspire
us with mistaken notions of dignity?" --Wollstonecraft
Fairness is a duty enjoined by the existence of typological
differentiation. But objectivity is a despicable pretence.
...eclecticism itself has a significance (cultural dispossession,
Late-Empire-style) which no act of appropriation can transcend.
That is, being uncultured, we approach past (& exotic present)
cultures in an inescapably superficial way--as COSTUME. And
the more we realize this, the more desperately we grasp at the
attainments of others.
"...Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on
condition he said the Lord's Prayer..." --Virginia Woolf, To the
Lighthouse (1927)
is the fact that not everyone wants it, needs it, or
knows what it is when they have it... But if i contemplate
this too long, i become speechless.
I'll side with any libel at 2 p.m.
Even so in significant an object as a paperclip, i cannot
help but regard with the same insistent awe that a preindustrial
human would at its precision of form & absolute symmetry.
"Dry facts, like biscuits..." --Sacheverell Sitwell
"...warring dualities..." --Ruth Pitter
Poets can still feel like they're taking part in a grand collective
enterprise: the denial of our extremity.
...the Albigensian Crusade (which would have discredited the
Christian Church forever if men had memories)...
"...why should the gracious fountain of life give us passions,
and the power of reflecting, only to imbitter our days and inspire
us with mistaken notions of dignity?" --Wollstonecraft
Fairness is a duty enjoined by the existence of typological
differentiation. But objectivity is a despicable pretence.
...eclecticism itself has a significance (cultural dispossession,
Late-Empire-style) which no act of appropriation can transcend.
That is, being uncultured, we approach past (& exotic present)
cultures in an inescapably superficial way--as COSTUME. And
the more we realize this, the more desperately we grasp at the
attainments of others.
"...Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on
condition he said the Lord's Prayer..." --Virginia Woolf, To the
Lighthouse (1927)
Saturday, October 11, 2003
"Twin Peaks", if i'm not mistaken, brings
something new to network television: the
acceptance of dreams, visions, psychic &
religious experiences as an integral part
of ordinary life.
Real religions typically survive almost any
amount of persecution. Whereas these new ones
would be snuffed out by the smallest tax,
methinks...
The trouble is, money isn't real to me; & i don't
understand, when it warps human relationship, why.
The coercion of Technology is NOT the Rule of
Reason. (That's just its protective coloration
when attacked.)
Bad art is made by beliefs about art; good art
occurs in a state of incredulity.
...the style of parenting that seeks to perpetuate
its own lifestyle (materially) is simply self-
betrayal: a kind of significance-suicide (if it
has to be done over, the first time didn't
count). What should be perpetuated is dynamic
freedom & custodianship.
Even cultures require an Art of Dying. --[&]...our
previous selves!
Chalk-drawing on the sidewalk is what we are. One
good rain & we're gone.
something new to network television: the
acceptance of dreams, visions, psychic &
religious experiences as an integral part
of ordinary life.
Real religions typically survive almost any
amount of persecution. Whereas these new ones
would be snuffed out by the smallest tax,
methinks...
The trouble is, money isn't real to me; & i don't
understand, when it warps human relationship, why.
The coercion of Technology is NOT the Rule of
Reason. (That's just its protective coloration
when attacked.)
Bad art is made by beliefs about art; good art
occurs in a state of incredulity.
...the style of parenting that seeks to perpetuate
its own lifestyle (materially) is simply self-
betrayal: a kind of significance-suicide (if it
has to be done over, the first time didn't
count). What should be perpetuated is dynamic
freedom & custodianship.
Even cultures require an Art of Dying. --[&]...our
previous selves!
Chalk-drawing on the sidewalk is what we are. One
good rain & we're gone.
I'm starting to get used to new book
dust jackets that are printed to look
like a worn leather binding from a
hundred years ago, but i just saw one
that closely resembles a tattered
book jacket from mid-century. Woodgrain
Contact Paper Award, i say! Lemme
guess--the next thing after CD's will
be solid state; & they'll be
shaped like eight-tracks.
"The phrase was still in vogue that 'only
3 people understood Relativity' at a
time when Eddington was complaining that
the trouble about Relativity as an examina-
tion subject in 'Part III' [the hardest,
last test for the Mathematical Tripos]
was that it was such a soft option."
--Littlewood's Miscellany
Yes!
dust jackets that are printed to look
like a worn leather binding from a
hundred years ago, but i just saw one
that closely resembles a tattered
book jacket from mid-century. Woodgrain
Contact Paper Award, i say! Lemme
guess--the next thing after CD's will
be solid state; & they'll be
shaped like eight-tracks.
"The phrase was still in vogue that 'only
3 people understood Relativity' at a
time when Eddington was complaining that
the trouble about Relativity as an examina-
tion subject in 'Part III' [the hardest,
last test for the Mathematical Tripos]
was that it was such a soft option."
--Littlewood's Miscellany
Yes!
"Conditional
Beckon some cragsman's paradise from the sky,
Heart-beat slows down, lungs halt their heave,
So to descry, conceive
How it was with me when that sport began:
Muscle and nerve wrought for me by the strain.
Fain as of old I feign that yet I can.
Pass by some image of the world's desire,
Eye beam narrows, glance sharpens to discern,
So to attire, adorn
Some visitant from when that hunt began
Whose hardihood now tells me what is vain.
Fain as of old why feign that yet I can?
Butterfly thought, sail gaily through the void,
Seeking your mate, belike--gale-borne astray,
To be destroyed, betray,
Ice-caught, the thoughts from which your life began:
Torn downy wings that will not sail again.
Fain as of old, I feign that yet I can."
--I A Richards
#4 Sign of the Apocalypse: the Governator.
#5 Sign of the Apocalypse: The Olson Twins on the
cover of Rolling Stone
Listening to: Electronic Concept Orchestra- Moog
Groove (1969).
"Poem Plame"
Wedge of windshield droplets pungent the
Wipers miss
Land without humanism
Spark-like 'mid unearthed
Slope-side figtree-roots, sprockets Mabuhay harl
Sly fen of smog Dracula
Exultant
Repose of spears. Bubba the Love Sponge
Big freaky cereal die boxes of death
Siliconpimp Hertz
Rain fen of gym loss,
Tenuous night spatula,
Nixie taunt
10 09 03
Beckon some cragsman's paradise from the sky,
Heart-beat slows down, lungs halt their heave,
So to descry, conceive
How it was with me when that sport began:
Muscle and nerve wrought for me by the strain.
Fain as of old I feign that yet I can.
Pass by some image of the world's desire,
Eye beam narrows, glance sharpens to discern,
So to attire, adorn
Some visitant from when that hunt began
Whose hardihood now tells me what is vain.
Fain as of old why feign that yet I can?
Butterfly thought, sail gaily through the void,
Seeking your mate, belike--gale-borne astray,
To be destroyed, betray,
Ice-caught, the thoughts from which your life began:
Torn downy wings that will not sail again.
Fain as of old, I feign that yet I can."
--I A Richards
#4 Sign of the Apocalypse: the Governator.
#5 Sign of the Apocalypse: The Olson Twins on the
cover of Rolling Stone
Listening to: Electronic Concept Orchestra- Moog
Groove (1969).
"Poem Plame"
Wedge of windshield droplets pungent the
Wipers miss
Land without humanism
Spark-like 'mid unearthed
Slope-side figtree-roots, sprockets Mabuhay harl
Sly fen of smog Dracula
Exultant
Repose of spears. Bubba the Love Sponge
Big freaky cereal die boxes of death
Siliconpimp Hertz
Rain fen of gym loss,
Tenuous night spatula,
Nixie taunt
10 09 03
Friday, October 10, 2003
One of the most haunting modern star-myths is
what has come to be known as "The Epsilon Bootis
Affair". In the late 20s, Dutch experimenters
at Eindhoven recorded a curious effect of time-
delayed radar echoes (LDE) apparently originating
from near the Moon, & more specifically, at one of
the (Lagrange) points in space where an object
could repose indefinitely in a stable orbit. Some
44 years later the young Scottish writer Duncan
Lunan plotted these echoes & seemed to discover
a star map--of the constellation Bootis--which
singled out the star epsilon Bootis. Or at least,
a star map from 13,000 years ago (having shifted
in the interim)! --I first read about this in the
January 1974 issue of Analog, & his
almost Lovellian speculations, of an intelligent
race from a planet of the dimmer, yellow star
being slowly destroyed as the brighter, red giant
star expanded, so that finally they would send
a probe to communicate the nature of their disaster
(which arrived here a little early for our
scientists--)...inspired one of my own scifi
stories. (Odd, that when another writer treated
this star, he totally disregarded Lunan's thesis!)
Later determinations of the star's
distance & hence luminosity (shortening its lifetime
to such an extent that a life-bearing planet around
it become unrealistic) caused Lunan to retract, but
it is still a beautiful idea.
what has come to be known as "The Epsilon Bootis
Affair". In the late 20s, Dutch experimenters
at Eindhoven recorded a curious effect of time-
delayed radar echoes (LDE) apparently originating
from near the Moon, & more specifically, at one of
the (Lagrange) points in space where an object
could repose indefinitely in a stable orbit. Some
44 years later the young Scottish writer Duncan
Lunan plotted these echoes & seemed to discover
a star map--of the constellation Bootis--which
singled out the star epsilon Bootis. Or at least,
a star map from 13,000 years ago (having shifted
in the interim)! --I first read about this in the
January 1974 issue of Analog, & his
almost Lovellian speculations, of an intelligent
race from a planet of the dimmer, yellow star
being slowly destroyed as the brighter, red giant
star expanded, so that finally they would send
a probe to communicate the nature of their disaster
(which arrived here a little early for our
scientists--)...inspired one of my own scifi
stories. (Odd, that when another writer treated
this star, he totally disregarded Lunan's thesis!)
Later determinations of the star's
distance & hence luminosity (shortening its lifetime
to such an extent that a life-bearing planet around
it become unrealistic) caused Lunan to retract, but
it is still a beautiful idea.
"Witches ride brooms...because Nature abhors
a vacuum."
Pavane.
Amethysm.
Music about Pynchon.
"Speculative poetry's only recognized grandmaster..." (More.)
a vacuum."
Pavane.
Amethysm.
Music about Pynchon.
"Speculative poetry's only recognized grandmaster..." (More.)
"If gravity were like weather,
fickle, girdling the planet
in waves and pockets, there would
be days on which we could not move.
We would lie helpless, strapped
to the slowly turning earth.
For hours at a time we would consider
the nature of such an existence,
its underpinnings, its weights."
--Bruce Boston
Lojban palindromes.
Klingon Klezmer. (via Bartcop)
"The vision of the R'lyeh Lodge is the
formation of a Setian civilization in the
San Francisco Bay Area."
Hello Cthulhu Lunchbox.
"Wahhabi Sunrise"
Silvery ughten, drivemist
Pinkgold Governator shapes.
Rubble of elves. Black coolth snack
Out of this wandering slag
My foehn sprockets. The Cryptic
Crosses to bleak Gibraltar,
Its music swirls as windshield
Smears map the oncoming gulf
10 08 03
"In the book [Nightwood], [Djuna] Barnes's
real-life friend Daniel Mahoney, a self-hating
homosexual doctor infamous on Paris's Left Bank,
becomes character Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a Tiresias-
like prophet figure. Barnes lifted material from her
conversations with Mahoney for O'Connor's witty but
sad exegeses on human suffering. Barnes certainly
suffered for that artistic license. Mahoney showed up
one night at her apartment about a year after the
book's publication. There he held her hostage from
1 to 5 a.m., screaming at her, demeaning her writing
and knocking her down twice when she tried to
escape. Barnes wrote to Eliot, 'Little did I know what
a book could do to one.' " --Carol Casey
Listening to: Beck- Odelay.
What if your cat dies & you can't bear to get rid
of it?
Silvery ughten, drivemist
Pinkgold Governator shapes.
Rubble of elves. Black coolth snack
Out of this wandering slag
My foehn sprockets. The Cryptic
Crosses to bleak Gibraltar,
Its music swirls as windshield
Smears map the oncoming gulf
10 08 03
"In the book [Nightwood], [Djuna] Barnes's
real-life friend Daniel Mahoney, a self-hating
homosexual doctor infamous on Paris's Left Bank,
becomes character Dr. Matthew O'Connor, a Tiresias-
like prophet figure. Barnes lifted material from her
conversations with Mahoney for O'Connor's witty but
sad exegeses on human suffering. Barnes certainly
suffered for that artistic license. Mahoney showed up
one night at her apartment about a year after the
book's publication. There he held her hostage from
1 to 5 a.m., screaming at her, demeaning her writing
and knocking her down twice when she tried to
escape. Barnes wrote to Eliot, 'Little did I know what
a book could do to one.' " --Carol Casey
Listening to: Beck- Odelay.
What if your cat dies & you can't bear to get rid
of it?
'Translation is very much like copying paintings.'
--Pasternak
Bright colors now mean Toys & Snack Food.
"This wild fastidious hope is quick to languish;
Its smooth diaphanous escape is swifter
Than the pack of truth; no mortal can distinguish
Its trace upon the durable hereafter." --Elinor Wylie
'Yet though all night I reel under the feet of the gods,
dawn ever returns me to the mystic, white sea.'
--Callimachus, The Lock of Berenike (tr Lombardo
& Raynor, 1988)
'The dead are tired of poppies.' --Marina Tsvetaeva
"Story is the anathema of the true philosopher."
--John Hawkes, Whitejacket (1988)
"Chopin's music gradually becomes tubercular." --Gilbert
Highet
S[ensing]: I see it, I want it. / [I]N[tuitive]: I imagine it,
I want it.
"Democracy as pap, sir, is on a trial basis." --Dr Awkward
'...Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow--
In your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you--
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.
Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
from the terrible shipwreck of a star--
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
the falling stone
and the flag of smoke.' --Nelly Sachs
"Like bagpipes rotting through the walls." --Edith
Sitwell
"There is a stone, a cubic mile in size, a million
times harder than diamond. Every million years a
very holy man visits it to give it the lightest possible
touch. The stone is in the end worn away. This works
out at something like 10 to-the-35th years..."
--Littlewood's Miscellany
"A too-persistent research student drove his supervisor
to say 'Go away and work out the construction for a
regular polygon of 65537 sides'. The student returned
20 years later with a construction (deposited in the Archives
at Gottingen)." --ibid
--Pasternak
Bright colors now mean Toys & Snack Food.
"This wild fastidious hope is quick to languish;
Its smooth diaphanous escape is swifter
Than the pack of truth; no mortal can distinguish
Its trace upon the durable hereafter." --Elinor Wylie
'Yet though all night I reel under the feet of the gods,
dawn ever returns me to the mystic, white sea.'
--Callimachus, The Lock of Berenike (tr Lombardo
& Raynor, 1988)
'The dead are tired of poppies.' --Marina Tsvetaeva
"Story is the anathema of the true philosopher."
--John Hawkes, Whitejacket (1988)
"Chopin's music gradually becomes tubercular." --Gilbert
Highet
S[ensing]: I see it, I want it. / [I]N[tuitive]: I imagine it,
I want it.
"Democracy as pap, sir, is on a trial basis." --Dr Awkward
'...Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow--
In your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you--
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.
Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
from the terrible shipwreck of a star--
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
the falling stone
and the flag of smoke.' --Nelly Sachs
"Like bagpipes rotting through the walls." --Edith
Sitwell
"There is a stone, a cubic mile in size, a million
times harder than diamond. Every million years a
very holy man visits it to give it the lightest possible
touch. The stone is in the end worn away. This works
out at something like 10 to-the-35th years..."
--Littlewood's Miscellany
"A too-persistent research student drove his supervisor
to say 'Go away and work out the construction for a
regular polygon of 65537 sides'. The student returned
20 years later with a construction (deposited in the Archives
at Gottingen)." --ibid
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Can't stop laughing. (via Boing Boing) More (via Metafilter)
Born-again Yakuza. (via Rob Pongi)
A collection of ambigrams--including the first stanza
of "Jabberwocky".
Gary Coleman got 12.000 votes. (via Buzz Machine)
Born-again Yakuza. (via Rob Pongi)
A collection of ambigrams--including the first stanza
of "Jabberwocky".
Gary Coleman got 12.000 votes. (via Buzz Machine)
Chinese Braille. (via Language Hat) --what a
cool idea. Should be the name of a band.
"Some hermit of Hilarion's school austere" --Southey
Alien of the Day. (via Pickover)
Listening to: Frank Zappa- The Yellow Shark. (in
which Z. makes like Arnold Schoenberg...)
A 19c. Texas sculptress.
cool idea. Should be the name of a band.
"Some hermit of Hilarion's school austere" --Southey
Alien of the Day. (via Pickover)
Listening to: Frank Zappa- The Yellow Shark. (in
which Z. makes like Arnold Schoenberg...)
A 19c. Texas sculptress.
Music is only sweet against silence. Without it, it's
only another kind of noise. Space, too, is only per-
ceptible in relative silence. Thus is named "the desert"
--by what we discover there, by leaving (some of)
our noise behind. But silence is not a product to be
exploited or carried home. --Perhaps one can only
obtain a loosening of the noise-compulsion, if
that...
Philosophy is the building of a road. Out here, you
wander, you are grateful for one when you come
to it, but you can have no illusions about roads
belonging in this place or emanating from it
somehow. Exile, tsimtsum. For, of course, we came
from a forest or savannah or anyway a place with
trees, shade, & water. (=Talk) There is something
uniquely terrible about a dense throng of cacti.
The Old Ones.
A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for
a thousand years.
This wall visible from the moon, who will know
i made my part of it any better than the rest?
Late afternoons sometimes i suspect its purpose
isn't even to be visible from the moon.
11 26 90
Translated "Raps Clack Calcspar" for the International
Palindromists' Club: "Los golpes chasquean la piedra
caliza."
'And the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.' --Akhmatova
(tr. Jane Kenyon)
Being forced to listen to sagittarians [ES-P] is like
watching paint dry. It's not possible for me to do more
than sample their words now & then to see if they're
still fumbling around on the same subject--& yes, they
are. If they were carpenters like they are thinkers, they'd
hit their thumbs more than the nail. It makes me want to
snatch it away from them... (Books written for this reason.)
...suffering is a koan i must answer with my life (joy),
but i keep wanting intellectual solutions. Nixon financed
his first political campaign with poker money he won
in the war.
'...human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which
we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we
long to move the stars.' --Madame Bovary, xii
'Metaphorical language is the result of the disproportion
between man's short life and the immense and long-term
tasks he sets himself. Because of this, he needs to look at
things as sharply as an eagle and to convey his vision in
flashes which can be immediately apprehended. This is
just what poetry is.' --I Remember, Boris Pasternak
Lawrence Durrell died; i burn a stick of frankincense &
myrrh in his honor. Later i fix some onion soup in the
kitchen only to discover, in the living room where the
two smells blend, a typically Durrellian irony.
A language with only a future tense. (via Enigmatic Mermaid)
Or not.
only another kind of noise. Space, too, is only per-
ceptible in relative silence. Thus is named "the desert"
--by what we discover there, by leaving (some of)
our noise behind. But silence is not a product to be
exploited or carried home. --Perhaps one can only
obtain a loosening of the noise-compulsion, if
that...
Philosophy is the building of a road. Out here, you
wander, you are grateful for one when you come
to it, but you can have no illusions about roads
belonging in this place or emanating from it
somehow. Exile, tsimtsum. For, of course, we came
from a forest or savannah or anyway a place with
trees, shade, & water. (=Talk) There is something
uniquely terrible about a dense throng of cacti.
The Old Ones.
A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for
a thousand years.
This wall visible from the moon, who will know
i made my part of it any better than the rest?
Late afternoons sometimes i suspect its purpose
isn't even to be visible from the moon.
11 26 90
Translated "Raps Clack Calcspar" for the International
Palindromists' Club: "Los golpes chasquean la piedra
caliza."
'And the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.' --Akhmatova
(tr. Jane Kenyon)
Being forced to listen to sagittarians [ES-P] is like
watching paint dry. It's not possible for me to do more
than sample their words now & then to see if they're
still fumbling around on the same subject--& yes, they
are. If they were carpenters like they are thinkers, they'd
hit their thumbs more than the nail. It makes me want to
snatch it away from them... (Books written for this reason.)
...suffering is a koan i must answer with my life (joy),
but i keep wanting intellectual solutions. Nixon financed
his first political campaign with poker money he won
in the war.
'...human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which
we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we
long to move the stars.' --Madame Bovary, xii
'Metaphorical language is the result of the disproportion
between man's short life and the immense and long-term
tasks he sets himself. Because of this, he needs to look at
things as sharply as an eagle and to convey his vision in
flashes which can be immediately apprehended. This is
just what poetry is.' --I Remember, Boris Pasternak
Lawrence Durrell died; i burn a stick of frankincense &
myrrh in his honor. Later i fix some onion soup in the
kitchen only to discover, in the living room where the
two smells blend, a typically Durrellian irony.
A language with only a future tense. (via Enigmatic Mermaid)
Or not.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
"...a Fladerdale drawbridge, both before and after its recent reconstruction. Booze, drugs, recklessness, or senility played a role in all these unfortunate incidents. I've seen that bridge. It has an awesome system of claxons, lights, and barriers. But with so many lost or damaged souls about, tragedies are inevitable. Perhaps the local authorities should add one more sign to the set: Caution. Darwin at Work." --Alan Sullivan
Results of a large blog survey.
The changing pear-shape of the Earth.
"I met a Californian today with a guitar, from
which he was reeling off a merry Strain, and
asked him how it was possible he could be so
light-hearted while the flag of his Country was
passing to the hands of the stranger. Oh, said
the Californian. give us the guitar and a
fandango, and the devil take the flag." (via
Bellona Times)
Results of a large blog survey.
The changing pear-shape of the Earth.
"I met a Californian today with a guitar, from
which he was reeling off a merry Strain, and
asked him how it was possible he could be so
light-hearted while the flag of his Country was
passing to the hands of the stranger. Oh, said
the Californian. give us the guitar and a
fandango, and the devil take the flag." (via
Bellona Times)
AIDS update. (via Dr Menlo)
Spook the spooks. (via post-atomic)
Found poetry from Japan. (via ptarmigan)
"RB: It strikes me that so much of what I see in Japanese print media seems very retro.
DC: They were doing retro 20 years ago, you see. We didn’t start doing retro until five years ago. They are still ahead." --Douglas Coupland (via Caterina)
"It felt a bit ridiculous- four grown people all
out shopping for Barbie notebooks and strawberry-
scented erasers… but I knew it was necessary."
--Baghdad Burning
A flaw in Mesklin.
"Tony Roberts has painted the distant world of
Mesklin (from a novel by Hal Clements, Mission of
Gravity) as if it were one of Albert Bierstadt's scenes
of the western United States..." --James Elkins
Spook the spooks. (via post-atomic)
Found poetry from Japan. (via ptarmigan)
"RB: It strikes me that so much of what I see in Japanese print media seems very retro.
DC: They were doing retro 20 years ago, you see. We didn’t start doing retro until five years ago. They are still ahead." --Douglas Coupland (via Caterina)
"It felt a bit ridiculous- four grown people all
out shopping for Barbie notebooks and strawberry-
scented erasers… but I knew it was necessary."
--Baghdad Burning
A flaw in Mesklin.
"Tony Roberts has painted the distant world of
Mesklin (from a novel by Hal Clements, Mission of
Gravity) as if it were one of Albert Bierstadt's scenes
of the western United States..." --James Elkins
...Sitting Bull's remark about white people: "The love
of possessions is a disease with them."
In a limited universe of signifiers, things say them-
selves, & truth is self-evident. In an unlimited,
difficulties arise at every stage...questions of point
of view & veracity; ambiguity & the right to opine.
--Thus it seems revolutionary to open up a universe
of signifiers, however slightly. But i rather believe
the conditions for revolution precede its articulation...
The trouble is, writers of history identify the whole
process with the final conflagration. Thus writers
appear to foretell catastrophic events, over & over.
But they don't!
"Larvenschlupf, Sternschlupf, mit allen/ Kielen/ such
ich dich,/ Ungrund." ('hatching of grubs, hatching of
stars, with every/ keel/ I search for you,/ Fathomless.')
--Celan
"Etna da luz azul a Dante." --Juan Jose Arreola
[In Baja:] The Virgin Mary, painted in a satellite dish.
The ocean is too yang: bitter, violent, cold. Three
ways yang. As "three pieces equals mate" (a saying
in chess), three ways yang equals death.
Very low humidity makes you aware of being a bag
of water--a leaky bag. Rain here must be like the speech
of god. Sleep, in such a place, like smuggled ice. You
get out of your vehicle, immediately you recognize
there is "nothing to do". --Could one persist in that
realization, it would lead to enlightenment. But that
would be like prolonging astonishment beyond the
instant of realization. A secure beginning might be:
reluctance to describe.
...i found a dead vulture, crucified on a cactus--it
must have died a terrible death--i wrench a tail
feather loose for my hat; & wear it the rest of the trip
though it gets raggeder & raggeder in the cramped
confines of the bus.
Wind + Sun explain everything here. Boulders
spraypainted with names & years. I guess humans have
been doing something like this ever since they first
ventured into a desert. The immensity seems to demand
some defiant response. Ego vs non-ego in the starkest
opposition. (Interplanetary exploration will be no
different!) The alternative--is to identify with it all.
(And the alternative to that?)
The desire for meaning creates the Void. People ask
the meaning of life, the meaning of the world...they don't
ask the meaning of a pile of rocks.
Using spook words in poetry is like that sculptor
who exclusively uses cast-off radioactive debris
in his art.
"Hillbilly Heroin"
1.
Altair, rhostgitten oblong,
Foins through the rooky owl-light.
2.
Fanboys wax much piqued at
Groovy jackal zoo.
3.
All cold over there
As the color red leaps out,
As windy dreams bloom.
10 07 03
of possessions is a disease with them."
In a limited universe of signifiers, things say them-
selves, & truth is self-evident. In an unlimited,
difficulties arise at every stage...questions of point
of view & veracity; ambiguity & the right to opine.
--Thus it seems revolutionary to open up a universe
of signifiers, however slightly. But i rather believe
the conditions for revolution precede its articulation...
The trouble is, writers of history identify the whole
process with the final conflagration. Thus writers
appear to foretell catastrophic events, over & over.
But they don't!
"Larvenschlupf, Sternschlupf, mit allen/ Kielen/ such
ich dich,/ Ungrund." ('hatching of grubs, hatching of
stars, with every/ keel/ I search for you,/ Fathomless.')
--Celan
"Etna da luz azul a Dante." --Juan Jose Arreola
[In Baja:] The Virgin Mary, painted in a satellite dish.
The ocean is too yang: bitter, violent, cold. Three
ways yang. As "three pieces equals mate" (a saying
in chess), three ways yang equals death.
Very low humidity makes you aware of being a bag
of water--a leaky bag. Rain here must be like the speech
of god. Sleep, in such a place, like smuggled ice. You
get out of your vehicle, immediately you recognize
there is "nothing to do". --Could one persist in that
realization, it would lead to enlightenment. But that
would be like prolonging astonishment beyond the
instant of realization. A secure beginning might be:
reluctance to describe.
...i found a dead vulture, crucified on a cactus--it
must have died a terrible death--i wrench a tail
feather loose for my hat; & wear it the rest of the trip
though it gets raggeder & raggeder in the cramped
confines of the bus.
Wind + Sun explain everything here. Boulders
spraypainted with names & years. I guess humans have
been doing something like this ever since they first
ventured into a desert. The immensity seems to demand
some defiant response. Ego vs non-ego in the starkest
opposition. (Interplanetary exploration will be no
different!) The alternative--is to identify with it all.
(And the alternative to that?)
The desire for meaning creates the Void. People ask
the meaning of life, the meaning of the world...they don't
ask the meaning of a pile of rocks.
Using spook words in poetry is like that sculptor
who exclusively uses cast-off radioactive debris
in his art.
"Hillbilly Heroin"
1.
Altair, rhostgitten oblong,
Foins through the rooky owl-light.
2.
Fanboys wax much piqued at
Groovy jackal zoo.
3.
All cold over there
As the color red leaps out,
As windy dreams bloom.
10 07 03
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
"Nation Building"
Bling- bling- bling- plunk. Blood flag. Iron
Grom sweeping the lungfish will
Down go the dire did-- grammar
Prismatic, squib bullion; snow
ARPA, snow SUKLO, neon
Scully & rain up then foehn
10 07 03
Bling- bling- bling- plunk. Blood flag. Iron
Grom sweeping the lungfish will
Down go the dire did-- grammar
Prismatic, squib bullion; snow
ARPA, snow SUKLO, neon
Scully & rain up then foehn
10 07 03
"Felons of Gyms"
Fasting lipogram to rail
Gun Rumsfeld in KISS makeup
Great hatred little room kiln
Mackerel democracy
It filters through wry puree
OxyContin did. Detox
Twice, Marduk Emerald the
Cryptic: Secert Service name
Cat bell take?
10 04 03
Fasting lipogram to rail
Gun Rumsfeld in KISS makeup
Great hatred little room kiln
Mackerel democracy
It filters through wry puree
OxyContin did. Detox
Twice, Marduk Emerald the
Cryptic: Secert Service name
Cat bell take?
10 04 03
Consumerism & science: a popular religion & a
priestly one. Technology is where they intersect,
& increasingly that which justifies them both; art
exists only on the sufferance of its consumerist
uses.
Fable. Everyone has a cough. The old wizard listens
as they all shuffle past. He pronounces the fate of
each according to the quality of the sound.
"In diesem Amethyst
sind die Zeitalter der Nacht gelagert" --Nelly Sachs
('The ages of night/ are embedded in this amethyst')
"...suffering is the tension between what is and what is
not." --The Jungian Senoi dreamwork Manual
"Intellectus noster non tangit terminum eius." --Albertus
Magnus
The Insomnia of Reason is what produces Monsters.
"It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our
world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in
their native music and utter at intervals the words they
have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope
and wallow like dogs." --Emerson
A joke told by Mikhail Gorbachev: "They say that Mitterrand
has 100 lovers. One of them has AIDS, but he doesn't know
which one. Bush has 100 bodyguards. One is a terrorist, but
he doesn't know which one. Gorbachev has 100 economic
advisors. One is smart, but he doesn't know which one.
(quoted in 12.10.90 Time magazine)
"Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a
jar of vinegar--the emblem of life--and each dipped in his
fingers to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius
found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse
pronounced it sweet." --The Book of Tea
The selling of paintings is still as mysterious to me
as if there should exist a traffic in fairy toadstools.
Rewriting a poem is like patching a meteorite with
concrete. (Sometimes, however, years or months later,
another chunk from the same swarm falls into its
ordained place!)
"Snake slander is everywhere." --Bly
Toward midnight i heard about ten gunshots (more than
one kind) & called the police. An hour later some sort
of siren came around... The next night i slept soundly.
priestly one. Technology is where they intersect,
& increasingly that which justifies them both; art
exists only on the sufferance of its consumerist
uses.
Fable. Everyone has a cough. The old wizard listens
as they all shuffle past. He pronounces the fate of
each according to the quality of the sound.
"In diesem Amethyst
sind die Zeitalter der Nacht gelagert" --Nelly Sachs
('The ages of night/ are embedded in this amethyst')
"...suffering is the tension between what is and what is
not." --The Jungian Senoi dreamwork Manual
"Intellectus noster non tangit terminum eius." --Albertus
Magnus
The Insomnia of Reason is what produces Monsters.
"It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our
world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in
their native music and utter at intervals the words they
have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope
and wallow like dogs." --Emerson
A joke told by Mikhail Gorbachev: "They say that Mitterrand
has 100 lovers. One of them has AIDS, but he doesn't know
which one. Bush has 100 bodyguards. One is a terrorist, but
he doesn't know which one. Gorbachev has 100 economic
advisors. One is smart, but he doesn't know which one.
(quoted in 12.10.90 Time magazine)
"Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a
jar of vinegar--the emblem of life--and each dipped in his
fingers to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius
found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse
pronounced it sweet." --The Book of Tea
The selling of paintings is still as mysterious to me
as if there should exist a traffic in fairy toadstools.
Rewriting a poem is like patching a meteorite with
concrete. (Sometimes, however, years or months later,
another chunk from the same swarm falls into its
ordained place!)
"Snake slander is everywhere." --Bly
Toward midnight i heard about ten gunshots (more than
one kind) & called the police. An hour later some sort
of siren came around... The next night i slept soundly.
Monday, October 06, 2003
"My aporia achieved
the glamorous anticipation of an answer" --Lyn Hejinian
"Quick cats'-paws on the generous stray-away" --Keats
To denounce Egotism with the ego is a little like the
War to End All Wars which is always being fought--
& for other reasons...
"Under the flowery oleanders pale" --Matthew Arnold
(quoted in Powys, Visions and Revisions)
Modern warfare is so destructive it ought to be called
something else....In the long-range cultural context [1991],
rather, it signifies that the United States has reached a
point in its decline where neither its productivity nor
the prestige of its ideals can anymore convince the world
of its preeminence. Only sheer tonnage of bombs is left.
So we can expect to see lots of "little wars", as the real
leaders of the new order emerge as precisely those nations
[who refuse] to squander their resources on senseless
militarization... [And pyrrhic indeed shall those victories
be:] The Superbowl can be won; wars, like a forest fire,
just end. The important thing [for you & me] is not to
feel powerless. What has ended, what has been taken
away, here, are a few illusions about where things were
headed--& that's good. As for the rest...terrible though it
is to live through, even vicariously, i think that the hollow-
ness of its justifications are far more obvious to the Allies
today (though its leaders are obliged not to snigger); &
it's whole feel is so anachronistic, that it must not be many
generations to come before the world's population will
know this only as one of the many luxuries the Twentieth
Century boasted, & which they can no longer afford.
"In the eighth century of our era the dilettante of the
Japanese court established the tea cult and the play of
'listening to incense'. ...the game was not merely to know
which was which, but to give each of them a beautiful
and allusive name, to recall by the title some strange
event of history or some passage of romance or legend."
--Pound
The horror, the horror.
the glamorous anticipation of an answer" --Lyn Hejinian
"Quick cats'-paws on the generous stray-away" --Keats
To denounce Egotism with the ego is a little like the
War to End All Wars which is always being fought--
& for other reasons...
"Under the flowery oleanders pale" --Matthew Arnold
(quoted in Powys, Visions and Revisions)
Modern warfare is so destructive it ought to be called
something else....In the long-range cultural context [1991],
rather, it signifies that the United States has reached a
point in its decline where neither its productivity nor
the prestige of its ideals can anymore convince the world
of its preeminence. Only sheer tonnage of bombs is left.
So we can expect to see lots of "little wars", as the real
leaders of the new order emerge as precisely those nations
[who refuse] to squander their resources on senseless
militarization... [And pyrrhic indeed shall those victories
be:] The Superbowl can be won; wars, like a forest fire,
just end. The important thing [for you & me] is not to
feel powerless. What has ended, what has been taken
away, here, are a few illusions about where things were
headed--& that's good. As for the rest...terrible though it
is to live through, even vicariously, i think that the hollow-
ness of its justifications are far more obvious to the Allies
today (though its leaders are obliged not to snigger); &
it's whole feel is so anachronistic, that it must not be many
generations to come before the world's population will
know this only as one of the many luxuries the Twentieth
Century boasted, & which they can no longer afford.
"In the eighth century of our era the dilettante of the
Japanese court established the tea cult and the play of
'listening to incense'. ...the game was not merely to know
which was which, but to give each of them a beautiful
and allusive name, to recall by the title some strange
event of history or some passage of romance or legend."
--Pound
The horror, the horror.
Sunday, October 05, 2003
'No age is in such need of poetry as that which
thinks it can do without it.' --Jean Paul Richter
Is despair like a faith in the impossibility of all
efforts?
Everyone does Madonnas, never any Crucifixions...
Maybe that's the part of language (or at least,
textbooks as presently written) i care least for:
naming all the furniture. When a picture is a much
better description. Suppose there were a language
only for describing the invisible?
"Anthologies are to poets what zoos are to animals."
--David Antin
The absence of a common intellectual framework is
to the mind's cathedrals as the absence of mason guilds
is to real cathedrals that want to be built. All that can
happen today is the Watts Towers.
"You may be sure that a question which requires
music for an answer can't be put into words." --A Voyage
to Arcturus
I ought to just regard Art as a game i'm allowed to
play by myself but not with others...(My imaginary
playmates: the dead.) To be accepted, to be noticed, to
be cherished--this our birthright has been stolen; & we
are forced to fight amongst ourselves for scraps.
"Let no one consider the original noise." --Barrett Watten
thinks it can do without it.' --Jean Paul Richter
Is despair like a faith in the impossibility of all
efforts?
Everyone does Madonnas, never any Crucifixions...
Maybe that's the part of language (or at least,
textbooks as presently written) i care least for:
naming all the furniture. When a picture is a much
better description. Suppose there were a language
only for describing the invisible?
"Anthologies are to poets what zoos are to animals."
--David Antin
The absence of a common intellectual framework is
to the mind's cathedrals as the absence of mason guilds
is to real cathedrals that want to be built. All that can
happen today is the Watts Towers.
"You may be sure that a question which requires
music for an answer can't be put into words." --A Voyage
to Arcturus
I ought to just regard Art as a game i'm allowed to
play by myself but not with others...(My imaginary
playmates: the dead.) To be accepted, to be noticed, to
be cherished--this our birthright has been stolen; & we
are forced to fight amongst ourselves for scraps.
"Let no one consider the original noise." --Barrett Watten