"They say that Pal Benko is the last person who will ever have a major opening system named after him."


"The works of the ‘Comte de Permission’ are still commanding high prices..."


"There are a couple along the lines of "catfish man, go fall in the river and talk to the catfish", which you probably have to be drunk and hakama-clad to really appreciate..."

Robot for killing humans. (via M*tafilt*r)


   "Wish Finish"

Mud dumb stunt
gibbon murk adorn · adjourn ruth am
abort osmium

animals · must a stupid agonist fill
child's abstract inability ink
ambush burn · convincingly skald lack

adjoining
morbid crush to martyr idiom ajar
follow function · gray into

gray · furious at
shadowy impart
amphibian martyr · obolus golf grip

story folk
asking important mist music
its rainbow indigo lilt

ambiguous martyrdom
slag is · thoughts music
as stony path · as stark fury up

with adjunct
fallacy to ignorant Rodan input
gibbous issuing us of dismal slid should

accrual whirlwind night · slow oddly
not raucous · oblivious


"Reconstruction is an aspiration from another lifetime: I swear we no longer want buildings and bridges, security and an undivided Iraq are more than enough."


On my victrola- B*ssi* Smith

"Today is a referendum -- not just on Bush and his regime, but on the whole four decades over which that post-Goldwater Republican juggernaut has been rolling. When we look behind us now, we can see, beyond any possibility of denial, where it has taken us -- and where they mean to take us. The landscape they've dragged us through is scarred by broken lives and ruined hopes: the gutting of the middle class; the growing divide between rich and poor; the raging ugliness of the Culture Wars; the collapse of the educational, scientific, and planning infrastructure that fed our industries and empowered us to meet the future on our own terms; the humiliating exposure of the limits of American power; the reckless fouling of our air, land, and water; and -- perhaps most iconically -- the battered and exhausted army now making its last stand in the sands of Iraq."


"The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
The truth is hidden in a veil of tears"

Diff*r*nt Color Jumpsuit.


Snap, crackl*, and pop.

   "Guyana Punch

there's a strange one · in the jungle
and think I hear him · calling my name
there's a strange one · in the jungle
and he's offering · death without pain
freshen up freshen up freshen up

there's a strange one · in the jungle
and he says · that death need not hurt
there's a strange one · in the jungle
he's got something · to quench your thirst
freshen up freshen up freshen up
freshen up freshen up freshen up

Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh-oh uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh

there's a strange one · in the jungle
and he says · that Now is the time
there's a strange one · in the jungle
here come the planes · please form a straight line
freshen up freshen up freshen up

there's a strange one · in the jungle
and he questions · all that one thinks
there's a strange one · in the jungle
with a new and ex- · citing drink
freshen up freshen up freshen up
freshen up freshen up freshen up

Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh-oh uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh-oh uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh uh-oh-oh!
Guyana Punch!......uh-oh-oh uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh

there's a strange one · in the jungle
there's a strange one · in the jungle
there's a strange one · in the jungle
there's a strange one · in the jungle"

--from Washarama (1981)


Damnatio m*moria* (although it was never called that by the Romans).

(via rapha*lk dot co dot uk)


On my victrola- Th* Champs


"For now, they are invisible people."


"It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war was. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians." -- G*org* B*rnard Shaw, pr*fac* to "H*artbr*ak Hous*" (1919)


"Unlike most other signs, silence pretends not to be a sign. This might be the definition of silence: a sign that affects to be the negation of representation, to be the absence of a sign; it is a sign that suggests and evokes without actually representing." --Charl*s W H*drick Jr, History and Sil*nc* (2000)


"Your roising reid to rotting sall retour" --H*nryson

Guyana Punch. Plus.


      "Altarcito"

   a dark dry morning
carrying our trash bags out
   i rapidly lurch

Samhain amidst not so hush
war · and sundry forms of war

   a raucous storm broods
aroma of java · braids
   into my gray thoughts

sick of any opinions
past attaining lasting frith

   pick an airt and go
sound's swift ability
   born of loss · to fly

apricot bowl · its almost
cloying smooth own skin a cairn

   vacant Buddha fact
in halcyon driving · touch not
   Mlotkowski's folly

foggy vistas · songs in which
pain is soft as spun yoghurt

   thrown startlingly off
pallid among rocky paths
   haphazard blood trail

back out without first looking
birds jump in a parkinglot

   caraway snap wing
loathing · smirk at agony
   wait for a crimson

or for complicity shown
monstrous wish · as crows go by

   drill skull living · cry
national an handiwork
   gray sky caraway

city sunk gray occasional
banish music thalassa

   all music but this
slag flowing · implicit cusp
   tsunami wisp scry

abfraction murk atoll child
shard hilch as psychic Algol

   falling against off
clog prodigy swarming filch
   instinctual igloo

gift amok · apply glad silt
scalding with atomic scat

   in our door prying
music away or wall torn through
   school of birds standing

ilka solitary work
station across a vast pool

   rippling crystal and
lurch rapidly i as bags
   with trash carrying

morning dry dark our sojourn
flying acid mutiny

folk of rain our dry sojourn


T*n Lif* Changing Albums. (via Th* Blog of L*wd 3nlight*nm*nt)

(via t*hranmoca dot com slash *xhibition slash n*gargari)


   "Extroversion

I loan satiety to muscle in the pew before me
Miles from now appointing these alternative despondent selves
In charge of loading sins onto forgiveness
Toward sweet lawn curve
Of daisies seeming to be part of Mildred's dress
Sewn in her own words and why"

--Sh*ila 3. Murphy, Gr**n T*a with Ging*r (2003)


Sorrow Mountain.


"No dewfall softens this vast belt of dearth." --McKay


"The world is a ship that will never make port..." --Grant Ov*rton, Am*rican Nights 3nt*rtainm*nt (1923)

   "SPOKE OF JUMBLED GORGES

Lace back of mountains my fretted
vehicle on ice it shows

Blamed, all the stones, their streaks, then sky
opens bowl to the rained and rolling day

Fire, this chart beyond has got of crystal through
icicle wall of fricative semblance

Then PatternDemons whisper
in the PalmLines of my stone

Like taking a breath in vaccum light
the pounds of brain that store me"

--Clark Coolidg* (via)

(via paranormalghost dot com)


   "The Lilacs

Those laden lilacs
         at the lawn's end
Came stark, spindly,
         and in staggered file,
Like walking wounded
         from the dead of winter.
We watched them waken
         in the brusque weather
To rot and rootbreak,
         to ripped branches,
and saw them shiver
         as the memory swept them
Of night and numbness
         and the taste of nothing.
Out of present pain
         and from past terror
Their bullet-shaped buds
         came quick and bursting,
As if they aimed
         to be open with us!
But the sun suddenly
         settled about them,
And green and grateful
         the lilacs grew,
Healed in that hush,
         that hospital quiet.
These lacquered leaves
         where the light paddles
And the big blooms
         buzzing among them
Have kept their counsel,
         conveying nothing
Of their mortal message,
         unless one should measure
The depth and dumbness
         of death's kingdom
By the pure power
         of this perfume."

--Richard Wilbur, Waking to Sl**p: N*w Po*ms and Translations (1969)


Compr*h*nsiv* Aramaic L*xicon.


"So what would it mean to teach writing? You could teach a serviceable style, one that was pretty much like that of the journals the student wanted to publish in. Or you could have the student construct a style, learn about how to put together a unique style. Or you could be a style agnostic, like I am."


Do try this odd music.

Hygg* & lort. (via Cat*rina)

Gore Vidal Interview with Alex Jones Infowars, October 29, 2006 Texas Book Fest

Alex Jones interviews Gore Vidal at the Texas Book Festival October 29, 2006. The Infowars interview includes dicussion of a new 9/11 investigation, the criminal Bush Regime, media complicity (and poor media coverage by the New York Times and other "rags") as well as other topics.

Rout* 66 A. D.


   "Tanka

Black-and-white Holsteins
Crowd downfield at feeding-time,
Mingling their blotches.
It is like ice breaking up
In a dark, swollen river."

--Richard Wilbur


   "How Poetry Comes To Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light"

--Gary Snyd*r


Broth*rs Quay.


"Write in each room of the place you will die."


Cognizant oliphaunt mirror proof. (via M*tafilt*r)

by L** Mullican (via artn*t dot d*)


"In the past few decades alone noted scholars have characterized Jesus as a political revolutionary, a magician, a charismatic, a rabbi, a Hillelite or proto-Pharisee, an Essene, a wisdom prophet, a Cynic philosopher, and an eschatological prophet." --Fior*nza & Crossan, in: Th* 3lusiv* M*ssiah (ed Raymond Martin, 2000)


   "Cloak of Invisibility"

Orkhon running constantly stark Carcosa
a fraught optic throbbing word

crystal do
off ink and stomp pulsating holy

cold crystal Orkhon
pour it glut


Harv*st of Rag*.


"Fundamentalism [seeks] to offer a world of simplicity, lack of personal responsibility, immortality, purity and simplicity. These are notions of children. This is how two-year-old and three-year-old children think."

   "Hairy Polynomial"

Orkhon crisp akimbo shadowy tonic
until accruals that sink

ossify spiral
raucous skirl fill umgang obolus

softly ash
chalky class adjourn


On my victrola- Corn*lius: Phantasma


H*avy Plan*t.


"Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture." --John Rob8rt Colombo, in: Th* Big Book of National Insults

(via lavanchy-corn*r dot com)


Xiombarg filth · forlorn imbrication
obtain · gang

brisk · agonist of limbo
global stirious chunk · affords morbid crisp

all wodwo · crowbar
and rid imagining · abort brick

filk accrual · nadsat stomp
limits · mourn

snarky robot abusion · it rains pink snot
Ogpu rank · angling


Loot.


On my victrola- Sydn*y B*ch*t: R*cord*d in Conc*rt at th* Bruss*ls Fair, 1958

J*nné-j*no.

"With extinction my ancestor"

--M*rwin


   "Prodigal

Some day, when the stern seeker in my brain
Has ceased to drive me stumbling through the dark,
Dropping dead cinders for each faint new spark,
Only to see the new ones wax and wane;
When all my dreams are numbered with the slain;
And wisdom, that egregious patriarch,
Has told his last half truth, and left me stark;
I shall go home, I shall go home again.

Laughter will greet me, waiting in the hall;
And friendships will come trooping down the stairs,
Sweet as old rose leaves wrinkled in a jar.
Battles and loves will move me not at all.
There will be juleps, billiards, family prayers,
And a clean passport for another star."

--DuBos* H*yward


G*nghis Khan and th* Making of th* Mod*rn World.


Instrum*ntarium.

(via ict-*du dot nl)


   "It's Probably About the Bike

Once scheming, to our vast dismay,
Turned ricochet:
And tumbled down emblems of our pride;
And, by the way, three thousand died
In Nineveh.

Is this contrition we display,
To give away
Whatever made our country strong:
Its freedoms, peace, and righting wrong,
O Nineveh?

But empires all at last decay
And yield the clay.
Meanwhile we peasants still need scratch--
Why do we trim our dreams to match
Dead Nineveh?"

--H. P. Pufncraft, S is for Sitzfl*isch (2005)


"...a [Pitjantjatjara] translation of one of David Bowie's songs." (via Languag* Hat)


On my victrola- Col*man Hawkins: Th* Gold*n Hawk


Suav*cito.

Six word story follow-up. (via M*tafilt*r)


"The quickness of his mind--it had never seemed to him so nimble, so exquisite of mechanism of syllogism and deduction--was contraposed against his blind instinct of the would-be self-deceiver, in a conflict to which the latter brought something of desperation, the fierce, agonised desperation of a hunted animal at bay."

--3rn*st Dowson, Studi*s in S*ntim*nt


Hazmat Modin*. (via NPR)

   "Odyssey of the Wind Materials (first line by Claude McKay)

'Stray melodies of dim remembered runes'
Return when I am anything but ready.
What is a poet stricken thus, but giddy
With future thwarts, and present lost balloons?
I fail, and I am wise with a plangent mist
That tells me all I need to know of beginnings.
Riddle me more, or let the next swift innings
Contain their inmost cure as much as thirst!

Ah, well. I dwell among such eerie forms,
I learn and lose my way as at the first;
Someday when a chance wind sends me reeling
I"ll know what sort of monster writes these norms,
And what black seas I carry for my visit's ceiling."

--Yoko Mand*lbrot


Big As Night, 2.


' "Were all these poets from Karabagh too?" I interrupted.
"No, noble sir, but our poets are better, even if they refuse to imprison their words in dead letters. They are too proud to write down their poems--they just recite them." '

--Kurban Said, Ali and Nino (tr Graman, 1970)

Cthulhu Chick Tract again.

human mutiny · umgang
warm ink · amalgamating dusk
atavist brain · indigo
by lush ambush · ignorant rain
in igniting own · is hronir
imago · gibbons


List of Ac* Doubl*s.


'When a drop falls in the river, it becomes the river.
When a deed is done well, it becomes the future.'

--Bly's Ghalib

"...I’ve worked a little on my long terza rima comic murder mystery..."


   "Lunch Codes

I.

"She were keen on
the wetlands, and so were I."

Cap-sized bobs and chafing dishes

bobolink tenders.

Leguminous butt-ends deliquescing in the nurses' breezeway,
a quintessence of small-A ambrosia.

He peeked at your ballot box and something about aversion,
a nimbus of donut sugar, your lead-white aureole. Displaced
from the doghouse, a hardon-shaped piece of air.

The entire fountain was made of water and you, my muffin-hatted
Swede, educed a dozen thought molecules.

Mangroves are puppets, you said.

I haunted your ghost.

Remember?

I threw peonies at the shark (distracted)
and at the regional dishes of your forebears.

We've started thinking again.


II.

We were the taffy guild—
Time was our confection.

We shared in common—
Dread of the moment.

Our figures embraced—
Dense cloud of impurity.


III.

“Scores will perish.” "

--G. M. Quint*, in M*lancholia's Tr*mulous Dr*adlocks 3.


"...I think of it basically as comic..."


Intriguing words from Kunstl*r.

(via //*ricorb*aux dot romandi* dot com)


   "The Leaden-Eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep."

--Vach*l Lindsay


"Egwene's stomach sank into her feet."


"And I go darkly-rebel to my work" --McKay

THE CRIMES ARE THERE
GROW A PAIR
IMPEACHMENT 2007

(via ddd dot r2 dot ru slash 3d)


   "Waiting

They swear the dead come back at night,
Who once were women and men,
And sob and cry in the strange weather,
To be let in again.

Out by the straggling thorn I wait,
But you are not come yet;
So it must be that I remember,
And that you forget."

--Liz*tt* Woodworth R**s*, South*rn Po*ts


Bactrian gold.


History on Trial.


Curry.

landfill hills of today consign thy pumpkin
Samhain consign thy pumpkin

raining dark
abyss music consign thy pumpkin

maroon miasma
Xanadu plain consign thy pumpkin

but lift a glass for Grinchus
to basalt aurora consign thy pumpkin


Th* War B*tw**n th* Vow*ls and th* Consonants.


Th* Journ*y of Privat* Galion*. (cf Gravity's Rainbow)

(via noaan*ws dot noaa dot gov)


   "Dick Tracy on Mars"

squalid or marsupial porn dawns
obstruct habitat
wisp nomad scaffold karma

obtain rank
from burning pallors adjourn obsidian
nor books of calcspar

raucous with Uz aroma
my chill blood
on windy roads scuttling across Uz charcoal


Drift (scroll down for animation).


Saudad*.


"...when all is said and done, Venice is only a labyrinth--a vast and beautiful labyrinth to be sure, but a labyrinth nonetheless and none but its oldest inhabitants can be sure of finding their way about..." --Susanna Clark*, Jonathan Strang* & Mr Norr*ll (2004)

"We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years." --Riv*rb*nd


"300,000 over 24 years was 12,500 a year. Just awful.

600,000 over 3 1/2 years is 171,500 a year. Completely horrifying. Or can't people see that?" (--Cathy B)


"Did you ever meet a kind of person to whom you tell a story, or complain about some sort of problem, then look at him, only to find him absent minded in another world, then, he would turn to you to give you remarks and deductions which have nothing to do whatsoever with what you were talking about?
This is how it is to talk with most of the American administration's members, and most of the American Congress members. They are people who live only in their closed, limited world, who have no wish, or mental ability, to listen to the Other."


"...Bush, more closely resembles an abusive pimp – tragically, Lady Liberty’s. Habitually slapping her around, accusing her of holding out on him, and paranoid of betrayal, Bush, a preening caricature of Macho Narcissism, like any run-of-the-dark-alley pimp claims to be her protector, as, all the while, he abuses, exploits, and degrades her. Apropos, Bush’s vast collection of outfits for every occasion should include a plum purple pimp suit; accordingly, the presidential limo should be tricked out to sport 1970s-style Cadillac El Dorado opera windows, a two tone paint job, and be accessorized with plush, white fur-lined upholstery."

(via jpl dot nasa dot gov)


   "Icarus in November

There is a moment blind with light, split by the hum
  Of something struck and shaken otherwhere,
And if breath's pausing stills the heartbeat and the dumb
  Wet trees clutch every leaf, then on the air
Will blow slow, small, and keen, and faster, greater, higher,
  The hissing whoop of wind through timeless wings
A thuttering drum-beat round a cold immortal fire
  Half-muffling such a mortal cry as brings
  Fear to the lonely soul's imaginings,
A crescent wailing, and the little heart inclined
Hears Icarus, and how the chill gale moans behind.

Who said, O Sun, to Icarus that he must fly
  Or fall who dropped on this green wave at last?
Who fed him bitter aether from the tenuous sky
  Whirled in his winged mind all that is past
And pointed four directions to his stumbling soul?
  Quibbled the whence how where when who and what
Till golden antlers blossomed and the Tree was whole
  And Dian poised, and Icarus forgot
  What Icarus had been, and what had not,
And searching lost the hope that Icarus designed
And seeing, never saw that Icarus was blind?

O Iarus is fallen, alabaster foam
  Hangs stilly, still, Icare est chut ici,
White tangent to the green wave's arc he's shotten home
  Man-bird, sky-arrow to the unriddling sea,
Who was so questing, still unsated, lost to act,
  Quartered the zig-zag sky for beauty's use,
Swooped, soared, sailed, wheeled and turned and sudden stooped on fact
  Or use's beauty or the keen mind's loose
  Hot ions streaming in a fluent sluice,
Heedless that Icarus must fall against the wind
Echoing, ever falling in the hollow mind.

Sun of my night, lamp of my not uncertain void,
  Here Icarus is fallen, here he lies.
O fallen Icarus, whose fleshly eyes alloyed
  The fire and solar gold and still are eyes
Give me some manner bacck the brain, the hardiness--
  If Icarus is fallen once he flew.
Hard-taloned on the sunward wrist he scorned the jess
  Pressed on his quarry in aethereal blue.
  Icare est chut ici, and still he knew
Less where the heron went than what he hoped to find
And more the cloven hoof-print than the frightened hind."

--Al*c B St*v*nson, South*rn Po*ts (1936)



Th* Riddl* and th* Knight.


"One wonders if it will take the fall of the American Empire to uncover the full extent of Washington's war crimes."


"Stray melodies of dim remembered runes" --McKay

   "Oligarch Twilight"

just past my window's margin
you stay · words cannot
bring you into this crystal prism
along with all my crystal shards of color

you stay dark
dark and without form
till that day
i and my glass join in abfraction

and abfraction turns traitor


T. J. Bass.

"In the Gion district of Kyoto, there is--or I should say there was--a miburi-go (gesture language) structured around the forty eight signs (kana) representing syllables in the Japanese language..." --Michitâro Tada, Japan*s* G*stures (2004)

My Compassion and My Contempt Have It Out (photo by JR Compton)


Clar* Turlay N*wb*rry.


"We have not heard from Riverbend either, but hope that, as in the past, she has traveled to safer areas." Follow-up.


L is now known.

'...each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and () at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated," all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of it all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.' --Aimé Césair*, Discours* on Colonialism (1955; tr J Pinkham)


   "Dalit Cthulhu"

swamp viridian dawnlight
churchmutiny pools

arguing
among this bomb squad's top protocols

cars splash from long undraining blood troughs briskly
and furl spills

i would not touch a thing of
all viridian all ruth all gulls


"The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad." Plus. (via M*tafilt*r)


"The mutineers of the Chemin des Dames are the Front's only true heroes. It is their statues that should have pride of place in the capitals of Europe instead of those of their executioners." --St*ph*n O'Sh*a, Back to th* Front (1996)


3nigma.

(via adsofth*world dot com)


Jan Lukasi*wicz.


Props for Pamuk. (PS "On the day the prize was announced the French national assembly passed a bill making it an offense to deny the Armenian genocide, so that a person can now be prosecuted in France for denying something that it is a crime to assert in Turkey." (via Moorish Girl)


   "The Dream of a Child of a Man

I am standing in an abandoned classroom.
The linoleum floor is red. Spackle-scarred walls
batter me with a hospital's mildewed green.

Everywhere on this earth, there is either grunge

or a shadow that mimics the one dead body
that, propped like a puppet, a pillow, a sack of potatoes
turns the corner into something far too sharp.

Nearby a hat rack impales a skull like a joke, only
more fresh: Tatters of jerked skin still adhrre.
In the corner, a woman's panties, turquoise, bloody.

A German Junker racks the sky, expands it forever

which roars with its boom, the clanks and shouting, its
muted dives. In my dreams, I am a Ukrainian partisan
himself pausing to dream. My rifle is heavy

I hate it. The confiscation of the furniture of sleep

has left its scuff across the tiles, a demon's jagged name
or an abandoned letter home, but to where worries me.
A dead comrade's replacement crouches half within

the empty yet full gesture of a combat torn hallway
which would be a tale to tell you, my small child.
But a child in muddy taffeta is not crying here at all.

You were never born to me here, there, or ever."

--Gordon Hilg*rs, Th* War Against Th* Alphab*t (2000?)

(via g*n*va-link dot ch slash st*fcola slash storm)


   "THE WHITE CITY

I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I muse my life-long hate, and without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world's hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.
I see the mighty city through a mist--
The strident trains that speed the goaded mass,
The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed,
The fortressed port through which the great ships pass,
The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate,
Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate."

--Claud* McKay, Harl*m Shadows (1922)


"The reality of the otherworld was not in question. The Celts were so certain of it that they would even lend money to be repaid in the next world." --A*d**n Cr*min, Th* C*lts (1996)


York Wilson.


Cast*r's Blog.

   "A Lay of Winning and Losing"

a floor long
moon brain glow · solid unknown
against ambush · on

moaning indigo oblong crystal Darfur

a ongoing agony · closing
pools twinkling · psalm wobbly blindfold silk
adamant
lungfish anxious skillfully · par poison own

angular sandcoil Ogpu

warp Xiombarg in us
Italbar walking
ambush abort · dusk tsunami · shards sobbing
with ambit
solid raucous ours final unknown

ignominious wisp ink
why · wink such idiot botch
pools obsidian
floor sobbing indigo agony
octopoid
animals hybrid cannot · atavist rasp
slowly adapt · Darfur add · affliction full
crystal raucous polity until
again pools withal subtract


"The epic Teutonic anesthetic, Heavy Metal was brutally ham-fisted renderings of blues-based white rock--a totally moronic and downered wipe-out which complimented [sic] the Seventies teenage leisure activities of arson and alcoholism." --Juli* Burchill & Tony Parsons, Th* Boy Look*d at Johnny (1978)


Att*ntion-D*ficit D*mocracy.


"...Godzilla is inside each one of us." --Godzilla 2000

(via trav*l-*arth dot com)


"When asked about the disproportionately large hands found in his paintings, Pletka replied, "Frankly, there are two reasons. One is that I found hands to be difficult for me to do. So, I started focusing on them in order to do a really good job. The more I focused on them the bigger they became." "


   "A Bivouac

You came without a human sound,
  You came and brought my soul to me;
I only woke, and all around
They slumbered on the firelit ground,
  Beside the guns in Burgundy.

I felt the gesture of your hands,
  You signed my forehead with the Cross;
The gesture of your holy hands
Was bounteous--like the misty lands
  Along the Hills in Calvados.

But when I slept I saw your eyes,
  Hungry as death, and very far.
I saw demand in your dim eyes
Mysterious as the moons that rise
  At midnight, in the Pines of Var."

--B*lloc


"Whereas the historical eighteenth century lasted 126 years (from 1688 to 1815)...and the nineteenth century lasted ninety-nine years (from 1815 to 1914)...the twentieth century lasted seventy-five years (from 1914 to 1989)..." --ibid


Song.


"No wonder Southey could laugh when, having written fifty stanzas about the forthcoming royal wedding, he heard that the engagement had been called off." --Mark Stor*y, Rob*rt South*y: A Lif* (1997)

"Sleep: and between the closed eyelids of sleep,
From the dark spirit's still unresting grief,
The one tear burns its way. O God, O God,
What monstrous world is this, whence no escape
Even in sleep? Between the fast-shut lids
This one tear comes, hangs on the lashes, falls:
Symbol of some gigantic dream, that shakes
The secret-sleeping soul... And I descend
By a green cliff that fronts the worldlong sea;
Disastrous shore, where bones of ships and rocks
Are mixed; and beating waves bring in the sails
Of unskilled mariners, ill-starred. The gulls
Fall in a cloud upon foul flotsam there;
The air resounds with cries of scavengers."

--Aik*n


"It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.."


"But sixty years before that [1923], Jakob Burkhardt had written: The time of 'the terrible simplifers' will come." --John Lukacs, Th* Hitl*r of History (1997)

(via //xavi*r dot bord*ri* dot n*t slash blog)

(via //bass2000 dot obspm dot fr)

Clyfford Still, 1949 (via tigtail dot org)


"The deeper you dig the harder the rock, the narrower the tunnel, the lonelier the journey."


17.
radiant
miasmata walls
throughout scorn flurry

tatpurusha radiant Saragossa
squall psalm childhood twinkling aurora
quaff Samhain

fitful acquisitions walk
pursuing haystacks a Whig
pursuing radiant tamarind

laptop smoky · warp brain fighting ink wodwo
alloy spiral has
stairway air


Finish of Rocky Mini-World 134340.


3nd of Summ*r.


"There sounds a shot of pistol..."

(via d*mimond* dot com)


"The current temperature of (a quite cold) 405 degrees below zero will be but a distant memory at this point when the temperatures will be a balmy 360 degrees below zero."


16.
turbid crystal tomorrow ranch or
Calabi- Yau manifolds fail and a war

that nothing can stop
kohlrabi

lost · turbid crystal birdtalk
Cthulhu Wahhabi torn now

morning coolth · dogs stalk wobbly wodwo
north if thrush conscious turbid blood · lucid city


"Sometimes did it retire, tormentedly quitting
its twist of flesh in fresh torments of peace..."

--K*ndrick Smithyman


I am in this.

(via upsid*downhippo dot com)


"...We will very likely...have the first generation of string theorists retiring soon with absolutely no experimental tests of their *lifetime* of work. ...[S]ome people derisively refer to string theory as “recreational mathematical theology” ."


15.
crypt diamonds crawling syzygy child
stairway that will fall amok it indigo
addict as
ocular crystal must swarm

flip birdtalk
and against think my
practically lyrical ogganition myth
scrawny shadow diaspora flays


'When Gregory writes, the catastrophe has occurred, the Empire has fallen, its organization has collapsed, the culture of antiquity has been destroyed. But the tension is over. And it is more freely and directly, no longer haunted by insoluble tasks, no longer burdened by unrealizable pretensions, that Gregory's soul faces living reality, ready to apprehend it as such and to work in it practically.' --3rich Au*rbach, Mim*sis (1946; tr W F Trask)


City of Sacrific*.


Od* to 3ris.

Lojban Community Blog.


"Instead of letting the banalities (or dangers, or eccentricities, or irrelevancies) of the street fill one's soul, perhaps the best relationship one can have with the local is to take it somewhere else, lift it away from itself by means of travellers' tales, real or invented."


Mum for two months now, but a play too.


←Sinistrally, you can grok a not too old pic by yours truly--(thanks JR!).
And now i am publishing this book--Chastizing the Beautiful Monsters.

(via rt66 dot com/~kalmoth/hpl.html)


"...what is now called the Locrian mode was what the Greeks called the Mixolydian mode."



play math jazz crystal flying
iron lungfish
murk scaffold will contains brook rasp dusk
of my disciplinary burying parch

snow bright risk factors

if you go you go without wobbly
can't think in this flood
solid gray sky war bots do

Maban fray
or to imp this wing of possibly dry stains
or ford that crystal


14.

cyst sponsorship patina talk puts
blank faith puts

Calvinist tulip you bring
Python and out Apollo shows karma puts

La Llorona styrofoam
waltz qabbalah puts

cannot go back a raucous
coolth swarm cargo puts



"Like a grammarian, whose beak can parse
A sentence till its gaudy words mean nothing..."

--Aik*n


Crim*thinc.

(via //m*mbr*s dot lycos dot fr via languag*hat)


13.

tharf storp urn


"togetherness. The rise of this word may have started with Kahlil Gibran as far back as 1923. In The Prophet which is a publisher's dream of the inspirational gift book--a work for which limp leather would have had to be invented had it not existed--Gibran wrote of marriage: Let there be spaces in your togetherness. It is a civilized sentiment, but there was the dreadful word, and it has come under the eyes of millions in that one aphorism." --Foll*tt's Mod*rn Am*rican Usag*


Six word story.


Dualists.

"This remarkable tour de force details with exquisite precision how the antiworld is tied to our everyday realm." (via Bliv*t)


Discontinuous.


12.
a toy B-52 · liban troutou thorn
only · Mithridation thorn

throngs · of grout
swift irony · thorn

twinkling cloud god play · solitary
blind scrollwork but · Tsathoggua thorn

atqa accrual · Maban
many stars · daft thorn

scaffold dahusya polygraph · black diamond
wrong word · thorn

a viralata form · links
two potato shotgun and · aurora thorn

its twistboards sing with slag · lush gaunt gold
full youth · of my thorn


Offshor*.


'We come to this town in droves, strangers to the last man, drawn by the glitter, and born to be burnt.' -3ndr* Ady, N*ighbours of th* Night


On my victrola- Od*tta Sings Folk Songs

(via p*rformingarts dot nd dot *du)


11.
wisp rasp krill primary trap
a lark a high school polka
wisp knosp clown hibakusha
dusk swarm days and sobbing wodwo

a storm child lost among ions
thinks only of wisp rasp krill
joint cloud commission lingo
dust rain naturally batiks



"He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed, to protest against the Vietnam war."

10.
proboscis on that golf ball
out alight firn dingo its wraith waltz
fashionista black
basilisk

Panopticon confabulum purport black
apricot carp waltz
occupation days turn from saying
up quantum vacuum puppy

mills up black
oblong myrrh
spoor of curbs to ford
about cold about mutiny silk frost its


'Poetry is of all clear streams the one that lingers least about its reflected bridges.' --R*n* Char


On my victrola- Bix B*id*rb*ck*

(via micha*lcox dot com)


9.
proof for hronir loops
fish crawling spoor noticing waltz loops

follow off plush rot
sculpt an oblong rainbow loops
cloud appalling adult's octopus twistboards
borg sorg hum act · sciamachy loops

fjord and cold
squall Grinchus curb cyborg figuring myrrh loops


"Twelve Democrats crossed party lines to vote for the bill. One Republican, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, voted against it."


"We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant." --St*v*nson

"...any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably." --Rob*rt Louis St*v*nson


8.
myrrhmurmuring has burning
Mothman cyst
trustworthy crystal thought smirk
mutiny fragrant am ruinous

orchid nightclub put
again short
rains ash obsidian a brisk and missing
indigo ogham smog gob

stoop whist mystic nabob possibility
scuttling by


"My 6-year-old daughterelephant could have painted that!"

(via saturn dot jpl do nasa dot gov)


"The major sport of the Middle Ages was war, with its adjuncts the tournament, the joust, and the judicial duel. War had its open and closed seasons dependent upon conditions of climate and upon the great Festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Ascension, even its attempts at quiet week-ends in the Truce of God, and the right of private war was the most valued of the sporting privileges of the mediaeval barons..." --Charl*s Hom*r Haskins, Studi*s in M*dia*val Cultur* (c. 1929)


7.
dark torn thousands convicts rigors sloop of cloud
dormant Ogpu silkworm pools
all twinkling twistboards
road of acrostic atoms rains scour

knoll swarm clouds
glory obsidian slash twistboards
on this scoriac path in addict whorl spool
which torn God shards scour

6.
arousal lull · birth victim · gulf fnast
twistboards brain and catacombs has · hazaj fnast

swimming · curb
glory logic fnast

Umbrist spur · amongst pallid
folk fulvous doff · squids its logic fnast

gaunt jumpsuits swimming many
storp firm fnast

this ruinous infant light's · convolutions
Grinchus chaos fnast



"I was particularly struck by the comparison to Dutch."



"According to Yaqut, the compiler of a biographical dictionary in the thirteenth century, when Buhturi recited his poetry, 'he used to walk up and down the room, backwards and forwards, and he shook his head and shoulders, stretched his arm out and shouted: "Beautiful, by God!" and he attacked his audience, calling out to them, "Why do you not applaud?" ' " --Night & Hors*s & th* D*s*rt

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." --H L M*nck*n, according to Phil Rockstroh (via wood_s lot)

5.

rain torn a
nightclub child's wouldn't squall · gulls throughout
this dull light · all things running along brain thin
immortal glory

obsidian slash portal
rain torn now
twinkling hist'ry starts affadavit victim
knoll functioning Miniron at orb


"Besides, such a crowd of well-meaning, amiable, most respectable men have broken down of late years the pales of Parnassus, and become squatters on the sacred mount, that the claim of poets to be a peculiar people is getting disallowed." --Smith


For*ign Bab*s in B*ijing.


On my victrola- Oum Kalthoum

"and if I ever lose my eyes
I won't have to cry no more"

-Cat St*v*ns


4.
storm child polyps don't
impair scrum thrifty silkworm
blackouts adamant

spool commission slag know sport
anything adumbrating


"...The gold
hides in the ground

the way tomorrow's weather
hides in the air,

the way what I will finally know
hides in me now."

--Rob*rt K*lly

Lost Book of 3nki.

"break room linoleum
the dead cricket now
part of the decor"

--Dov* Linkhorn


3.
squall Uqbar ruinous constantly

blindfold claw furl squid
oblong run
lapwing across crisply mutiny final
angular pools rub Asgard

sculpt loss folks is today rasp
insight stunt
slag cyborg who all with instant odds
of claim flown idiocy schism that wallops

twinkling affliction
ruck frost a psychic
squamous autopsy simply


"A man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar bitters of the literary life." --Al*xand*r Smith


M*di*val Cats.

    "Whenever a famous movie actor, director or producer passes away, it makes front page news.  Sometimes a screenwriter's death also makes headlines.  On the other hand, it's rare when the passing of other eminent film industry professionals attracts much media attention.  All this is a roundabout way of saying that many of you might not be aware that Sven Nykvist, one of the true giants in the field of cinematography, has died.  For film aficionados across the globe, this is discouraging news indeed, though we still have Nykvist's incredible body of work to remind us of his talent.
    In his illustrious career, Nykvist was most widely celebrated for his collaborations with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and won Academy awards for 1973's "Cries and Whsipers" and 1983's "Fanny and Alexander." Nykvist's resume also includes films for American directors such as Woody Allen ("Another Woman"), Philip Kaufman ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being") and Bob Rafelson (the 1981 remake of "The Postman Always Rings Twice").  Additonally, he teamed up with fellow Swede Lasse Hallstrom for the Texas based "What's Eating Gilbert Grape."

 I guess I should have included a footnote in my email about Sven Nykvist yesterday, but I was in the computer lab at school and was having a hard time collecting my thoughts, especially given the glitch I experienced the first time I tried composing the message.  Anyway, if I could add one personal thought to the original missive it would be that when I started really reading and studying a lot about movies when I was in 6th-7th grade, Nykvist was the first cinemtographer  I learned to recognize by name. Of course, it would be a few years before a jr. high kid growing up in Garland in the early 70's would get the chance to actually see a Bergman-Nykvist film...but at least I was prepared when the day finally came.  
    Anyway, cliche that it is, his passing only reminds me of my own faded youth...and how much more I've learned since then."

--M*lani* Pruit

"Morning train--
Entering the dark tunnel
Suddenly: my face"

--Marco Fratic*lli


Fathom.


2.
smackdown and national bruxism
pillow cold warn strongly opal possibly
lookout card
Jada do craving

it conspiracy finish
pallor practically Algol
smackdown passport cranch
carving you Ramadan giddy Visa rush

squall psalm nightclub warrior giddy
grassy knoll
Miniron tribulations wouldn't


'Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything which needs walls and curtains..' --Marcus Aur*lius

"The silence after geese
fade from sight
part of me following"

--David 3lliott


   Rocky Mini-World 134340

1.
if Youth throughout autopsy
all twinkling history
silkworm affadavit lurch had pink
had a gnat simply a sandbag champion kill

a lion
to blackjack
shocking catacombs swimming
curb stand twistboards up digital fracas chimp

sucking wound for pools
victim frabjous it crypt to crook run
full show and truthful
blackouts brown bag a popular ramp

razor stars
solid doubting wobbly world idolatry
suspicions and rumors spliff
that polygraph python dusk

a young child assassin ring turncoat
additional crash
can commission downtown abruptly think gulls
Oak Cliff quick


Nykvist.

Ixion · oxidizing
Sisyphus pools · indigo loon
axis mists adorn · willow
tzompantli · birdtalk and aggry
ash bilk osmium · dying opt
thwart · sunlight usurp



"...the sons of bitches who killed America once & for all are walking around free. That’s what drives me crazy. And they will die comfortably in their beds. That, too, drives me crazy. But nothing drives me as fucking crazy as the fact that roughly half my countrymen inhabit the same moral hell as the torturers who rule us. That fact drives me nearly to despair."


"At heart
I am a Moslem
at heart
I am an American artist"

--Patti Smith, 3ast*r


"In truth, 'Seattle's wisdom' came from the pen of a white screenwriter from Texas, and his moving words were the single highlight of an obscure television script on pollution produced by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1972." --Playing Indian, which points to R*cov*ring th* Word: 3ssays on Nativ* Am*rican Lit*ratur* pp 497-536.

Rambl* Hous* Onlin* ! (K**l*r, Gadsby, Cadav*r of Gid*on Wyck...)

   "XXXIII.

Of meadows drowsy with Trinacrian bees,
Of shapes that moved a rising mist among--
Persephone between the Cypress trees--
Of lengthier shades along the woodland flung,
Of calm upon the hardly whispering seas,
Of cloud that to the distant island clung--
He made of emerald evening and of these
A holier song than ever yet was sung.

But silence and the single-thoughted night,
Hearing such music took him for their own
To that long land, where, men forgotten quite
Harpless he errs by Lethe stream alone.
He never more will know that wind-flower's white--
He never more shall hear uneasy autumn moan."

--B*lloc


"Note: Jane Dunlap is a pseudonym for Adelle Davis who is better known for her books on natural foods and nutrition."


"starting to rain
shower of petals
on last year's garden"

--M L Bittl*-D*Lapa

("Tornado Ov*r Kansas" by John St*uart Curry)


   "CI.

Angels I saw at night knock at the wine-house gate:
They shaped the clay of Adam, flung into moulds its weight.

Spirits of the Unseen World of Purities divine,
With me an earth-bound mortal, poured forth their 'wildering wine.

Heaven, from its heavy trust aspiring to be free,
The duty was allotted, mad as I am, to me.

Thank God my friend and I once more sweet peace have gained!
For this the houris dancing thanksgiving cups have drained.

With Fancy's hundred wisps what wonder that I've strayed,
When Adam in his prudence was by a grain bewrayed?

Excuse the wrangling sects, which number seventy-two:
They knock at Fable's portal, for Truth eludes their view.

No fire is that whose flame the taper laughs to scorn:
True fire consumes to ashes the moth's upgarnered corn.

Blood fills recluses' hearts where Love its dot doth place,
Fine as the mole that glistens upon a charmer's face.

    As Háfiz, none Thought's face
    Hath yet unveiled; not e'en
    Since for the brides of Language
    Combed have their tresses been."

--Háfiz (tr H Bickn*ll, in: P*rsian Lit*ratur* 1900)


Scifi stars list with maps. (via M*tafilt*r)


L*agu* of th* Militant Godl*ss.


On my victrola- Lucinda Williams: Car Wh**ls on a Grav*l Road


"moss hung trees
a deer moves into
the hunter's silence"

--Winona Bak*r

"Cambodia is a dream come true for international losers--a beautiful but badly beaten woman, staked out on an anthill for every predator in the world to do with what he wishes." --Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour (2001)


    "xxii.

Mother of all my cities once there lay
   About your weedy wharves an orient shower
   Of spice and languorous silk and all the dower
That Ocean gave you on his bridal day.
And now the youth and age have passed away
   And all the sail superb and all the power;
   Your time's a time of memory like that hour
Just after sunset, wonderful and grey.

Too tired to rise and much too sad to weep,
   With strong arm nerveless on a neveless knee,
Still to your slumbering ears the spousal deep
   Murmurs his thoughts of eld eternally;
But your soul wakes not from its holy sleep
Dreaming of dead delights beside a tideless sea."

--B*lloc


The Age of Propaganda is followed by The Age of Mosquitos.

--sayings of Asmoday


Patriots.


R*d Star Rogu*.

(via flyingturtl*toys dot com)


"sharply we flower in this foul farewell" --Conrad Aik*n


   "DOWN CHANNEL

The Channel pours out on the Ebb in a river gigantic.
  There is no Moon.
The Dark is low in a cloud on the huge Atlantic.
  We'll be raising the Lizard soon.

There will be no meeting of eyes, nor any blessing,
  After the run.
The lips are still and the hand has ceased from caressing.
  There is nothing more to be done."

--Hillair* B*lloc, Sonn*ts & V*rs* (1944)


"This has to be the most handy piece of cooking instruction embedded in a cultural text since Master P's "Ghetto D"."


'Man and the unthought are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries.' --Foucault, quoted in: Robin Blas*r, "Th* Practic* of Outsid*"

"But in these times of global madness, as World War III perhaps gets underway, who really cares about Language Poetry being to the Academy of American Poets what Stravinsky is to Brahms, or what Cindy Sherman is to Edward Weston?"


War pigs. (via Juan Col*)


"winter moon
taking all night to cross
so small a pond"

--K*n Hurm, in: Haiku Mom*nt ed Bruc* Ross (1993)



   "BAT-GEODE

Bat-geode, the
geode has a bat inside it.

Fine inlay work, gold
and brown for the wings and peak ears

fuzzy russet blot face.

Upright phoenix bird
out of a grey sun, an iris, an orchid
without a name...

no, it
is a bat, crystal bat

split, spread flat
its guts

yellow quartz.

When I look inside
I see layer and layer of cracked ice, long
plains of ice, nothing on them, the plains

crazed, nothing on them, cold plains of nothing.

Only the wind
moves over them, the wind

and one crystal bat looking for another."

--John Tagg*rt, Prism and th* Pin* Twig (1977)

A not long ago pic.

Original, anci*nt music at Civilization On* dot com.


OuLiPo links. (via wood_s lot)


"...the most influential online zine for American poetry is published by John Tranter in Australia."


'CASIDA OF THE RECLINING WOMAN

To see you naked is to remember the earth.
The smooth earth, swept clean of horses.
The earth without a reed, the pure form
closed to the future: confine of silver.

To see you naked is to comprehend the desire
of the rain which seeks the feeble form,
or the fever of the sea when its immense face
cannot find the light of its cheek.

The blood will resound through the bedrooms
and arrive with flashing sword,
but you will not know where the heart
of the toad or the violet hide.

Your belly is a battle of roots,
your lips are a blurred dawn.
Under the tepid roses of the bed
the dead moan, waiting their turn.'

--F*d*rico García Lorca (tr N di Giovanni), in: S*l*ct*d Po*ms (1955)

(via tropicalisland dot d*)


"I hear the waves on our island shore
They sound much louder than they did before
A rising swell flecked with foam
Threatens the existence of our island home.
 
A strong wind blows in from a distant place
The palm trees bend like never before
Our crops are lost to the rising sea
And water covers our humble floor.

Our people are leaving for a distant shore
And soon Tuvalu may be no more
Holding on to the things they know are true
Tuvalu my Tuvalu, I cry for you.

And as our people are forced to roam
To another land to call their home
And as you go to that place so new
Take a little piece of Tuvalu with you.

Tuvalu culture is rare and unique
And holds a message we all should seek
Hold our culture way up high
And our beloved Tuvalu will never die."

--Jan* R*stur*


Shadowplay.


tarragon · waft prolong iron
harrows Ogpu · forlorn Angkor
swimming rat · afflict still up
grow polyps floss · portal into
ogham mists · iron torturing inch
   what raw hronir · crouch

Strang* Statu*s. (via Lisablog)


How living still is good, amidst anxious chaos.


"I have always been convinced that jeeps killed about as many people as any other weapon in World War II." --Bill Mauldin, Th* Brass Ring (1971)


   foggy moon · again
ago syzygy · umgang
   for torturing · ink
sandcoil · ignorant random
winds anvil · wailing ago


Gr*at Maya Droughts.


"The hour is starry, and the airs that stray,
Sad wanderers from their golden home of day,
On night's black mountain melt and fade away
In sorrow that is music."

--B*ddo*s


On Mahfouz.

Hidd*n Citi*s.


"We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare..."

--Y*ats


"...the holocaust
of the poorest of the poor..."


This azury pink dawnlight, swiftly lost.


affadavit of off · salt
adorns · patchouli avowal
without utmost · pools afar
doors of affadavit · asking
raucous slalom · storm basilisk
adjourn · pools crystal


On my victrola- F*rnanda Maria Canta F*rnanda Maria

Mid-road arbow row on Royal, cut out for truck roofs to pass.


   "In Love For Long
 
I've been in love for long
With what I cannot tell
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mould or shape,
From which there's no escape.

It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as still
As the established hill.

It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?

This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays and morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world's vice.

And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world's day long.

This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger's paws
And vindicates its cause."

--Edwin Muir


Soci*ty for Art of Imagination.


"...in the Mexican version of Abbot y Costello contra La Momia there is a sub-plot uncannily like the Fockers. The name of the family is Focas, or Los Focas. Cantinflas plays the part of the male nurse. Moya Focas being the name of the character."


On my victrola- Utr*nja

"...one feels that in Iran the masters just mentioned had finally, after several centuries, reached the point where they had exhausted the belles-lettrist possibilities of Arabic and were now very busily burning up its resources. How much further can one get in perfection than al-Hamadâni? He could compose a book on a certain theme, beginning with the last line and working back, line by line, to the first line, and it would be a marvel of rhetorical artistry." --Th* Cambridg* History of Iran, v. 4 (1975)


"My dream that Ratzi would go into a conclave and emerge to announce that it was all a mistake, the papacy was dissolved, and good Catholics should all embrace an enlightened materialistic naturalism hasn't come true just yet."


"War shrinks everything. It means less time, less tolerance, less imagination, less curiosity, less play. We cannot read the leisurely wasteful masterpieces of the past without being irritated by the amount they take for granted. ...Yet we must remember that the life which many of us are now leading is unfriendly to the appreciation of literature...In these philistine conditions it is as unfair to judge art as if we were seasick. It is even more unfair to blame writers for their action or inaction in the years before the war, when we still tolerate in office nearly all the old beaming second-rate faces, with their indomitable will to power, and their self-sealing tanks of complacency." --Cyril Connolly, in: Writ*rs of World War II


"It is important to see that fascism is a disease, as catching as influenza; we all when tired and disillusioned have fascist moments, when belief in human nature vanishes, when we burn with anger and envy like the underdog and the sucker, when we hate the virtuous and despise the weak, when we feel as Goebbels permanently feels, that all fine sentiment is ballyhoo, that we are the dupes of our leaders, and that the masses are evil, to be resisted with the cruelty born of fear. This is the theological sin of despair, a Haw-Haw moment which quickly passes, but which fascism has made permanent, and built up into a philosophy. In every human being there is a Lear and a fool, a hero and a clown who comes on the stage and burlesques his master. He should never be censored, but neither be allowed to rule." --ibid


"After several e-mails of discussion, she asked me to do a renga with her about peace without mentioning the word."

distinct walk Arkikosa
nor Algol Arkikosa

azury slag patchouli
blowback skald Arkikosa

can obsidian light stay
grisly Whig Arkikosa

cardboard mask Grinchus tsantsa
you that rock Arkikosa



"Next time someone diagnoses "the situation of poetry" in earnest tones."


"And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatization to it began to set in. (...) It was from this new insidious echoless propriety of ruins that you breathed in all that was most malarial. Reverses, losses, deadlocks now almost unnoticed bred one another; every day the news hammered one more nail into a consciousness which no longer resounded. Everywhere hung the heaviness of the even worse you could not be told and could not desire to hear. This was the lightless middle of the tunnel. Faith came down to a slogan, desperately re-worded to catch the eye, requiring to be pasted each time more strikingly on to hoardings and bases of monuments. ...No, no virtue was to be found in the outward order of things: happy those who could draw from some inner source." --3lizab*th Bow*n, from Th* H*at of th* Day; quoted in: Writ*rs in World War II, ed M Richler (1991)



"Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with which it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes." --Al*xand*r Smith


"Milman Parry asked an epic singer in Nevesinje, Hercegovina, if he could compose a song about him. Milovan Vojcic' did so, and it has been published in The Singer of Tales." --Lord


"The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards." --Smith

"They are insouciant against their missing what they have not owned,
     they alone can master this skill"


"Let me chop apart
With my bare hands
This blurred forest."

--Spic*r


"The tradition is not a rigid monolith outside the singer, but as dynamic as the singers who operate in it, who form and constantly reform it." --Lord, op cit


M. Pavic has now-ish "d*lta-nov*l" out!


Circumstantial assiduous hourglass folk · woo lay loo
Aglow shoal circumstantial · assiduous you'll forsook
Algol ash arousal lull fog · halloa wooly slug
Assiduous circumstantial · Allah forsook golly woo us


(via)


"And so [Avdo Mededovi´c] had a repertory of fifty-eight epics; Parry recorded nine of these on phonograph discs and Nikola Vujnovi´c, Parry's assistant, wrote down four others from Avdo's dictation. ...The total singing time for all the recorded material listed here is approximately fifty-three hours." --Lord

Coolth. Running on almost nothing. How good i am at that.


Wom*n of th* Asylum.


"...when Parry asked singers when they had finished dictating songs for him whether they thought that sung songs were better than dictated ones or vice versa, their answers invariably were: 'Sung songs are truer, dictated songs are finer.' " --Lord, op cit


Arcosanti craw
scalar posh

as famish into Ithaca wintry school
trawl washboard swag is scrumptious

caravan all basilisk crystal


"For many in Citta slow, the urban ideal is the late-medieval city, a rabbit warren of cobbled streets where people came together to shop, socialize and eat in charming piazzas." --Honoré


"Linguistics is divided like Graves' mythology of mythology, a triple goddess--morphology, phonology, and syntax." --Jack Spic*r

Sentence #4, guest-edited by Peter Johnson, is now available.

Peter has selected prose poems for this issue from:

Robert Alexander, John Allman, Nin Andrews, Margaret Atwood, Walter Bergen, Chad Bartlett, Louis E. Bourgeois, John Bradley, Jen Bryant, Laura Chester, Killarney Clary, Peter Conners, Matthew Cooperman, Andy Cox, Talia Danesi, Cortney Davis, Michel Delville, Denise Duhamel, Jamey Dunham, Tom Dvorske, Russell Edson, Richard Garcia, Scott Glassman, Georges Godeau (tr. Kathleen McGookey), Ray Gonzalez, Nolan Heinz, Cecil Helman, Friedrich Holderlin (tr. Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff), Louis Jenkins, Brian Johnson, Roxane Beth Johnson, Alice Jones, Christine Boyka Kluge, Ginger Knowlton, Mary A. Koncel, Gerry LaFemina, David Lehman, P. H. Liotta, Rachel Loden, Gian Lombardo, Eric Lorberer, Robert Lunday, Morton Marcus, Campbell McGrath, Joyelle McSweeney, Jay Meek, Christopher Merrill, Robert Miltner, Michelle Noteboom, Nina Nyhart, Ethan Paquin, Jane Lunin Perel, Chris Propst, Kerry Reilly, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Maureen Seaton, David Shumate, Barry Silesky, James Tate, Ryan van Cleave, Mark Vinz, Liz Waldner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Thom Ward, Charles Harper Webb, Bruce Weigl, Tom Whalen, Elizabeth Willis, Max Winter, Peter Wortsman, Kirby Wright, and Gary Young.

The issue also features essays by Marjorie Perloff, Peter Johnson, and Rolf Hughes. And:
Joe Ahearn reviews Sight Progress, by Zhang Er
Sally Ashton reviews Povel, by Geraldine Kim
Jarret Green reviews The Feast, by Walter Bargen
Brooke Horvath reviews Heart of Anthracite, by Campbell McGrath
Gian Lombardo reviews two books by Carlos M. Luis and Derek White
Ellen McGrath Smith reviews The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, by Rachel Loden
Jerry McGuire reviews Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair, by George Kalamaras
Chris Murray reviews nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, by Sawako Nakayasu
Ravi Shankar reviews Precise Machine, by Dennis Barone
Rebecca Spears reviews The After-Death History of My Mother, by Sandy McIntosh
Plus the usual bibliography of recent articles and books on prose poetry, prose poets, and the poetics of the prose poem.

Sentence is available at many independent bookstores around the country. If your local book store doesn't carry Sentence, it may order from Bernhard DeBoer. You may subscribe or purchase a single copy at the Sentence website: http://firewheel-editions.org/sentence/current.htm
Sentence is also available from Amazon and EBSCO.

"Two centuries ago, the average pig took five years to reach 130 pounds; today, it hits 220 pounds just after six months and is slaughtered before it loses its baby teeth." --Carl Honoré, In Prais* of Slown*ss (2004)


Always angry, always anxious; but wanting most of all, to follow a narrow path without difficulty or slowdwns. I put on music, and try to think of humans as making only this sound. Not a raucous roar, or cry of pain. Just this. This.


"Why should we not erect an asylum for venerable genius, as we do for the brave and the helpless part of our citizens? It might be inscribed a Hospital for Incurables!" --Curiositi*s


Bitt*r is th* N*w Black.



Arkikosa crawling skald
silk akin
Sogdian tsunami laptop scaffold fry

mask twinkling slow fizz
unknown aggry osmium skin map
alloy idiom

is gibbons
slag skull caracul skimp biz

on asking folly ago idolatry
fizgig fathoms and its usurp sump


"...for this cold impersonal dawn was for me another kind of darkness, a new and secret form of night." --Gw*ndolyn Mac3e*n


Plan*tary Dissid*nts.

"A shadowy, unapproachable forest of maple, birch, dogwood, cypress and pine softened by a garland of New England wildflowers: bergamot, columbine, rue anemone, blue violet, creeping phlox, bloodroot, toadflax, and pixie moss. ." (via M*tafilt*r)


marrow turmoil zarf
Munthuch zarf

bright bars Sogdian script aurochs myrrh
murmuring sandalwood zarf

toad dirham parch stomp tumultuous wodwo
Mithra sorrow zarf

aurochs myrrh lair Grinchus waspish chull
dowsing chav talismans zarf


"Sir Robert Cotton (it is said) being one day at his tailor's, discovered (what must have been the antiquary's astonishment!) that the man held in his hand, ready to cut up for measures--the original Magna Charta, with all its appendages of seals and signatures. He bought the singular curiosity for a trifle, and recovered in this manner what had been given over for lost! This anecdote is found in the Colomesiana, page 198; and Colomies long resided and died in this country, a man of pure morals and rigid veracity. The original Magna Charta is certainly preserved in the Cottonian library; it exhibits marks of dilapidation, but whether from the invisible scythe of time, or the humble scissors of the tailor, I leave for the subject of a future archaiological volume." --ibid


Ik Marv*l.


"Sherman's work then descends into darkness..."

"In the sixties you'd count on less than one percent of moulds meeting tolerance, which translated to about three or four hundred diaphragms per day being rejected and sent to orphanages where they'd be used as foundation garments. Nowadays the figure is in the thousands and they go straight to landfill."


   "TV Off

He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass--

Staring into flames, through thr grille of age
Like a late fish, face clothed with fungus,
Keeping its mouth upstream.

Remorseful for what nobody any longer suffers
Nostalgic for what he would not give twopence to see back
Hopeful for what he will not miss when it fails

Who lay a night and a day and a night and a day
Golden-haired, while his friend beside him
Attending a small hole in his brow
Ripened black."

--T*d Hugh*s


"The situation only makes sense if you consider a separate entity called "American Christianity" which is an entirely separate religion to Christianity." (via robotwisdom)


Taylorism.


"It is a curious circumstance in literature, that we owe Tacitus to this singular copy [from a monast*ry in W*stphalia]; for the Roman Emperor of that name had copies of the works of his illustrious ancestor, placed in all the libraries of the empire, and every year had ten copies transcribed: but the Roman libraries were all destroyed, and the imperial protection has availed nothing against the teeth of time." --Curiositi*s of Lit*ratur*

finicky chav sharav · coign
of nadir · mokita incog

in this abrupt coolth · Pluto
ablution · no ringing ghost coign

talion potlatch · snitch brillig
hip octopus · griffin incog

obsidian thorns throng · Grinchus
clings · Achamoth coign


Kilim.


Aurochs R*divivus.

     "Ad Lustrum"

   Boiling rush of gray
clouds still caravan into
   dusk of pyramids;
and our haggard claustration
finds fright unavailing still.


On my victrola- this (no 3nglish).


"Et fit saepe nefas iaculum temptante lacerto." --Lucan vi. 79 ('And many a murder is done when the arm is merely testing the javelin.')


Gr**ning of Gr**nland. (via AL Daily)