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)

Found.


Twilight of th* Wagn*rs.


"Over a period of eight months, beginning in November, 2002, Perelman posted a proof of the Poincaré on the Internet in three installments." (via M*tafilt*r)



ordalic crystal
wrong runway

as it rains, in August, a fifth
occasion

car roof sagging
tugs my hat

azury dawn
school
a road grown wispy


Slow blog.


Zin* Wiki.

(via saturntoday)


Armagordian knot, kiln, dirham.
Carrion crow, calx, dirham.

Battalions of diamonds again shorn parch stomp
lair dirham.

Scouring carrion
Grinchus abort toad dirham.


"At that point I had no idea what religion I was supposed to be a priest in, but I knew there was a religion somewhere where I was supposed to be a priest." --Isaac Bon*wits, in: B*ing a Pagan, Hopman & Bond (1996)


Th* Long Now Foundation.


Dim*nsional typography.

"One of the noteworthy facts about Linear B is that it seems not to have been used for writing Mycenaean oral-traditional literature or even for creating a written Mycenaean literature. Mycenaean literacy served the interests of trade or religion." --Alb*rt Lord, 3pic Sing*rs and Oral Tradition (1991)



"   War Is Better Than Ever

The family of man was once at war
With the family that lived in the cave next door.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And teamed their forces that they might meet
The looming presence across the street.

And the looming presence became a war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And combined their armies to go put down
The evil force from the other town.

With that evil force they fought a war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And when it was done, they knelt to pray,
But some men worshiped a heathen way.

And religious difference became a war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And built great navies that they might free
The captive peoples across the sea.

And with ships and guns they fought a war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And nations prospered and empires, too,
And the size and scope of the conflicts grew.

And conflicting interests produced a war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And built defenses to guard their shores,
And they fought a war to end all wars.

And the war they fought to end all war
That was even worse than the war before.
And they fought that way for many a year
'Til they learned to conquer hate and fear.
And they counted down, and they set the stage,
And they gave the world the Atomic Age.

And if there comes an atomic war
It will be far worse than the wars before.
There's an ancient, deadly pattern burned,
And the question is, has the family learned?
Or do we still pattern how we behave
After how it was in the family cave?"

--Charl*s Osgood, Nothing Could B* Fin*r Than a Crisis That is Minor in th* Morning (1979)


Cool paintings of an old asylum. (via M*tafilt*r)


Alibi.

"Ad lustrum" at Po*mcub* (via Craig Hill).


A fi*ld guid* to 3lvis shrin*s.


This song complains of monotony. But it is that familiar flow, finishing, which would form our worst fright clyting. So sing of no comfort in old songs; sing of what will occur as if it might find us thus happily changing. Isn't it important, though difficult to think through thoroughly? For what good is having imagination, if it only brings forth trivial things?


"I think there are compelling economic, social, health, ecological and even security/defense reasons why local , intensive urban organic farms are the way to go. ."


"War! That awful condition which a famous military man in command of a division, long ago, said was synonymous with Satan and all his cohorts! War! That awful condition of human minds coming down from way, way back of all history; that vast void during which sympathy was not known; during which animals fought with tooth, claw or horn; that vast void during which wounds had no soothing balm, until thirst, agony or a final swoon laid low a gigantic mammoth, or a tiny, gasping fawn! But now, again, in this grand day of Man's magically growing brain, this day of kindly crooning to infants in cribs; kindly talks to boys and girls in school; and blood-tingling orations from thousands of pulpits upon that Holy Command: 'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' now, again, Man is out to kill his own kind." --Gadsby


On my victrola- W*b*rn's S*chs Stück* für Orch*st*r op. 6

Not now a major world but still a Sailor (via moonprinc*ss dot com)


it starts to rain; and in that mismo instant a car crash occurs. My mind grasps it and its half-painful symbolism, as i go on working without stint.


"...Assam tea can be malty, sweet AND smooth..."


"But what would you do if someone dug up the body of Abraham Lincoln, pulled down the monument to George Washington, and took them to Egypt?" --Th* Bat Fli*s Low


"...Kripke's writings...have had more influence on philosophy in the US and the UK than any others since the death of Wittgenstein."


   a pallid hour
Old Kingdom · WalpurgisMart
   strolling · furious
rain · wintry dusk in which flights
of swift thoughts scour ilka sky


"we have a church where the others stood
it's made of ash"

--M*rwin

i count up what is worth saving, as if this thought could work. But actually i am saving nothing.


"ENVOY FROM D'AUBIGNÉ

Go book

go
now I will let you
I open the grave
live
I will die for us both

go but come again if you can
and feed me in prison

if they ask you why
you do not boast of me
tell them as they
have forgotten
truth habitually
gives birth in private

Go without ornament
without showy garment
if there is in you any
joy
may the good find it

for the others be
a glass broken in their mouths

Child
how will you
survive with nothing but your virtue
to draw around you
when they shout Die die

who have been frightened before
the many

I think of all I wrote in my time
dew
and I am standing in dry air

Here are what flowers there are
and what hope
from my years

and the fire I carried with me

Book
burn what will not abide your light

When I consider the old ambitions
to be on many lips
meaning little there
it would be enough for me to know
who is writing this
and sleep knowing it

far from glory and its gibbets

and dream of those who drank at the icy fountain
and told the truth"

--W S M*rwin, Th* Carri*r of Ladd*rs (1970)


"And that the book got: it sold an estimated 130,000 copies out of an initial print run of 170,000 on the first day."


"...strengthless as a noon-belated moon..." --Francis Thompson


"We find that a disrupter we find that a disrupter is singularly useful in an emergency but entirely impractical when used too continuously. We have returned to our normal footing. We love the hand. The hand that forbids collisions." --Th* Yal* G*rtrud* St*in


Th* 3gyptologist.

(via artic dot *du slash aic)


You Got away With It.


To think of how many original story plots this surprising fact of global warming now hands an aspiring bard: thrilling flights from collapsing civilization, valiant fights against natural & human chaos; plus what wistful thoughts a bard can sing of a world's long turning into totally otro.



Niagara scirocco waltz
ogham rays crisp basilisk

psalmist's filch tricky logic
scratch accruals form swank cairn

glowing storm tzompantli sough
again shorn parch Umbrist wrath

caracul syzygy tsar
scouring trichignosis night


1939 ascii-art. (via R*b*cca Blood)


"The Japanese knew just how inadequate our equipment was, because they destroyed or captured practically all of it." --W L White, Th*y W*r* 3xp*ndabl* (1942)


" 'There was once a monk called Paphnutius,' said Lincoln Hayes." --Sax Rohm*r, Th* Bat Fli*s Low (1935)


Monk*y Pick*d Oolong.

Ghost Rid*rs on th* Storm.


An inch horizon churns its shadow land this morning,
and i find but a chary vim to hand this morning.

Car bombs downtown paralyzing root and branch
among impostors God's a burning brand this morning.

Your lilt in troublous days aligns my vagrant yaw;
i finish nomad tracks in Maui sand this morning.

Nidor at a standstill, car still wanting aid,
i hum an impish ditty you command this morning.

For Grinchus found upon alarm invasion jangling
his mind was dight with Kali's hall so grand this morning.


"woke up this morning ·: and I got myself a beer
I woke up this morning ·: and I got myself a beer
the future's uncertain and the ·: is always near"

--Jim Morrison

Skinny Dipping.


"Like grey clouds one by one my songs upsoar
Over my soul's cold peaks; and one by one
They loose their little rain, and are no more;
And whether well or ill, to tell me there is none."

--Francis Thompson


1 Nh3 Na6.


"There is no confusion but true.
Get through."

--St*in