Wood And What Is Whispered Into Its Multitude of Forms

ANNE CARSON on LEAR TOWN

2012-01-31T17:40:00.004-06:00

Clamor the bells falling bells.
Precede silence of bells.
As madness precedes.
Winter as childhood.
Precedes father.
Into the kill-hole.

-from"The Life of Towns"

VALÉRY on THE SOUND OF A HORN IN THE HEART OF A FOREST

2012-01-21T21:38:00.004-06:00

I do not pretend to be teaching you anything at all. I will say nothing you do not already know; but I will, perhaps, say it in a different order. You do not need to be told that a poet is not always incapable of solving a rule of three, or that a logician is not always incapable of seeing in words something other than concepts, categories, and mere pretexts for syllogisms.

On this point I would add this paradoxical remark: if the logician could never be other than a logician, he would not, and could not, be a logician; and if the poet were never anything but a poet, without the slightest hope of being able to reason abstractly, he would leave no poetic traces behind him. I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.

-from Poetry of Abstract Thought

BECKETT on HAND HOLDING

2011-12-13T21:51:00.005-06:00

COME AND GO (1965)

FLETCHER on THE SESTET

2011-12-04T13:31:00.002-06:00

Take the number six. It is the first so-called perfect number. Six is the number of sides to each cell in that perfect housing complex--the bee's honeycomb. Six is the number of points of all snowflakes--the "silent syllables" of snow, Longfellow called them. There is an infinite number of snowflakes, each different from every other, and yet all have six points. They embody the scalar perfection of six. This is a perfect number because both the sum and the product of its parts yield a six: 1+2+3=6, or 1X2X3=6. The second perfect number is 28: 1+2+4+7+14=28, and the same holds for the factors as divisors. The learned scholar of Indo-Muslim antiquity, Annemarie Schimmel, reminds us not only of the powerful religious symbolisms adhering to the lunar 28 (with its internal 7s), but oddly that all the cells of the skin are regenerated and replaced every 28 days.

-from Angus Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2004)

The late painter Larry Day on act 4 of King Lear

2011-11-05T09:55:00.004-05:00

Titian, "The Flaying of Marsyas", 1575

Marcus on Influence

2011-10-20T20:13:00.006-05:00

Today, students in my creative influence seminar discussed parts of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, which attempts to trace The Sex Pistols influences from Situationist International back to the Knights of the Round Table and an Islamic Gnostic.

A particularly inspiring moment from Marcus' epilogue:

"If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other's existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not."

ASHBERY on CACOPHONY

2011-10-08T09:28:00.000-05:00

"I like things that seem to me good of their kind, and don't especially care what the kind is."

-from the introduction to The Best American American Poetry 1988

And two selections from that inaugural anthology:

WORDS

Barbara Guest

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word
recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced
as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where
patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased,
eyes curled outside themes to search the paper
now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word
entered its continent eager to find another as
capable as thorn. The nearest possession would
house them both, they being then two might glide
into this house and presently create a rather larger
mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious
as a newly laid table where related objects might gather
to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,
the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle
of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved
knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might
choose and savor before swallowing so much was the
sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words
placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent
percipient as elder branches in the night where words
gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

NOSTALGIA OF THE LAKEFRONTS

Donald Justice

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises.
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance—
And always the sad piano in the distance,

Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)
Or some far horn repeating over water
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,
And this is the world we run to from the world.

Or the two worlds come together and are one
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,
And stereopticons brought out and dusted,
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo.
(Would this have been summer, 1942?)

By June the city always seems neurotic.
But lakes are good all summer for reflection,
And ours is famed among painters for its blues,
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection.
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique—
To anthropomorphize the inanimate
With a love that masquerades as pure technique?

O art and the child were innocent together!
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,
And we, when we come back, will come as parents.
There are no lanterns now strung between pines—
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines.

And after a time the lakefront disappears
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers.
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;
Then we remember, whether we would or no.
—Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.

BECKETT on THE WHY ARISING AND EVERYTHING BEGINNING IN THAT WEARINESS TINGED WITH AMAZEMENT

2011-09-12T08:40:00.001-05:00

QUADRAT 1+2 (1982)

a strange thirst persists

2011-07-26T17:29:00.000-05:00

In our throats a strange thirst persists. Perhaps there would be an end. Comes a shoreline. Comes a harbor--a river. And our identities come back in horror at the river's mouth that pleads for more silt, more sand, refuses to slide clean to the sea. At the river's first bend we come ashore, and on that shore, stones. Smooth, diminishing stones.

-Greta Wrolstad, from NOTES ON SEA & SHORE

FREY on EMPATHY

2011-06-30T17:21:00.000-05:00

(from SORROW ARROW)
My relationship to the unknown is in peril

A field of baking elephant shit

Love makes me permeable

The softest hurricane

Tiny computers are breaking into the clouds

Arrows are raining down

In line for breakfast I fuck the ground

I get inside the mailbox and bang around

Information equals empathy erosion

The more you know

You want the boy/girl splayed on the runway

Until the strawberry in your pocket melts

Hold still to let it bleed down your leg

-Emily Kendal Frey, as read at BAD BLOOD 6

EARL CRAIG on BLUE LIGHT

2011-05-23T17:54:00.000-05:00

CITY AT NIGHT

I was at the acupuncturist's.
Me again, I said to the ceiling.

I'd been put in the Crucifix Room.
This was a room where the walls
and ceiling were lined with
crucifixes. Every square inch.
Crucifixes of all sizes; of wood, metal,
and polished bone; of colored glass and jewels.
It was like being inside a giant helmet.
A kind of helmet of crucifixes.

She had put the needles in
and left me in the dark.
A single candle flickered on the desk.
I felt my lower lip sagging a bit.
I lay there breathing.
I was like a city at night.

Beside me flowed a river.
I was a city at night on the banks of a river.
The various crucifixes flashed a little
in the moonlight, sound of water lapping.
There were a thousand struggling souls in that city.
Usually they'd be crying out to God.
But this particular night they quietly let
the blue light go coursing through the parks,
past auto dealerships, past bakeries,
through hospital courtyards, down the long alleys,
through the train station and each of the train cars.

After a while God called down to them.
He hadn't heard from them.
It was all very strange to him.

-from Michael Earl Craig's Thin Kimono
, (Wave Books, 2010).

EMERSON on THE OUTDOORS

2011-04-09T21:38:00.000-05:00

"Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors." - from Representative Men

I can think of many contemporary poets in whose brains I've nestled. Often, Ashbery's is not one of them. But that is okay, because he writes poems like this:

The Chateau Hardware

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

*

And I love him for that.

ODE DAYS ODE

2011-04-01T08:25:00.000-05:00

Dan and I did a little sewing yesterday, and are pleased to announce that Hannah Sanghee Park's ODE DAYS ODE is now available over at The Catenary Press.

Excerpt from Ode Days Ode

BLACK THURSDAY

...has far to go

The nerve to lean, and land a holy kiss:
a move of Judas—holy as the (quote)
“eternal winter” Blake wrote of that Thurs-
day. What is holy? What were wholly notes
for poems, what was love? We watched the lines
the sea threw off and knew our faith. And think
of faith, its ghosting through a crash—the time
we choose to close our eyes—when we will drink
whatever's placed in front of us—within
the cup is wine or blood: we choose. To scoff,
expected, but the world, it stretches in
a way to make the taste of wine seem off.
I think, you'd say, your tastebuds need a rinse.
I lie alone. Another day begins.

(Cover design by Rawaan Alkhatib)

CONSOLE (uncanny)

2011-03-27T16:31:00.000-05:00

0

When I first saw the need for a study of this kind I was living with my brother just out of sight from the house, in the past. I suppose we were waiting for Black Monday. There were comets in the air. It was beautiful over Libya and beautiful over Chernobyl. In fact it was so beautiful that you had to turn away, violently, sometimes only seconds after liftoff. Our teachers were too stunned by the direction things had taken to be of any use. But none of this meant very much to me or to Mickey. We were taking our meals on a rope, going through butcher paper like there was no tomorrow. We drew planes in profile and bullets in midflight. We were still convinced of a graphical solution. In fact there was no tomorrow.

-from Cyrus Console's Brief Under Water, published by Burning Deck in 2008. Yes, 2008.

THE MINOR TOUR, part VII

2011-03-21T20:53:00.000-05:00

Dear Minneapolis:

My fingers holding Matt's book in front of MC's sign. And Claire read last.

SLOPE on MARCH

2011-03-10T20:27:00.000-06:00

SLOPE'S DAILY WEATHER REPORT FOR MARCH, 2011, brought to you by Sandra Doller, Lucas Farrell, Lisa Fishman, Rick Meier, Sara Mumolo, Brandon Shimoda, Jared Stanley

2011-02-26T21:55:00.000-06:00

I'M MADE OF METAL AND WOOD
YOU ARE GOING MUCH TOO FAST

MACARTHUR on BISHOP

2011-02-08T11:08:00.000-06:00

Dreams, like armored cars, have the power to take us through dangerous territory relatively unscathed (we may be upset when we wake, but we are are not physically hurt), and in them we can defy gravity (climbing a ledge of shale, sleeping standing up).

-from "The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery 'The House Abandoned'" by Marit MacArthur

SLEEPING STANDING UP

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
through ninety dark degrees;
the bureau lies on the wall
and thoughts that were recumbent in the day
rise as the others fall,
stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.

The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do
so many a dangerous thing,
are chugging at its edge
all camouflaged, and ready to go through
the swiftest streams, or up a ledge
of crumbling shale, while plates and trappings ring.

--Through turret-slits we saw the crumbs or pebbles that lay
below the riveted flanks
on the green forest floor,
like those the clever children placed by day
and followed to their door
one night, at least; and in the ugly tanks

we tracked them all the night. Sometimes they disappeared,
dissolving in the moss,
sometimes we went too fast
and ground them underneath. How stupidly we steered
until the night was past
and never found out where the cottage was.

Happy Birthday Ms. Bishop

BINGO on GOEDICKE

2011-01-29T10:55:00.001-06:00

Steven Bingo, an archivist at the University of Montana, has been working on this, for poet Patricia Goedicke, a former mentor and dear friend.

Trompe L'Oeil

Death be my home light. Turn night
on its black grindstone.

From sleep's sleepless engine
deliver me: who toys feebly with jaws,

who tricycles fast into false
relief in a trompe l'oeil window.

In this that was love's room

who cries spectre come,
deck me, cuff me with spent fuses

soon enough dwindles from false dawn
into false death wish or is it.

Sees who cannot. Fumbles for cracked glasses,

from cheating hat-trick
fitful dreams shot out

with no scythe yet
come whistling from the opposite corner,

that these chipped
under the lying stars dragged out
hours of un-life be gone

come nearer, begs, come nearer

(from Goedicke's The Baseball Field At Night, Lost Horse Press, 2008.)

SLOPE 47

2011-01-18T20:13:00.000-06:00

...edited by the lovely Amber Nelson, is up.

CLEAR NEW WORLDS

2011-01-13T12:55:00.000-06:00

Here are a few images by the very talented Armin Mühsam, who also happened to design the cover of BLOOM.

Liviana Dan, Curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, Romania says that "One never knows the locations of the places that Mühsam paints but one instantly realizes why humans are absent. Humanity is represented by its destructive fabrications: tunnels, dikes, walls, excavations, roads...an artificial landscape filled with technological architecture, or rather, a landscape as a backdrop for technology."

CORMAC McCARTHY on ALIEN HEARTS

2011-01-06T09:58:00.000-06:00

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night.
-from Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West

TUYMANS on the POLAROID

2010-12-09T21:08:00.000-06:00

"A Polaroid is not really a photograph... it's a liquid in which the image appears. One of the attractive things about them is that they are, in essence, tied to an extreme randomness; you never know exactly how one is going to develop...it's precisely this inherent element of loss and possible failure that I value."

Der Architekt, 1997

Schwarzheide, 1986

Body, 1990

Last March, after reading in Brooklyn, a woman told me that some of my poems reminded her of some paintings by Luc Tuymans.

THE MINOR TOUR, part VI

2010-11-28T10:01:00.000-06:00

Dear Red Hook:

Dorothy is a very good listener and host. And it is good to have a face to put with Joshua's name.

Dear Brooklyn:

Erika and Steven set the mood. And it is also good to have a face to put with Patrick's name. Patrick, whom, after listening to me read at Goodbye Blue Monday, read the following at St. Mark's:

Frozen leaves like glass
bells shatter under-
foot. The river
splinters
audibly and heaves its
huge shards shoreward.

Patrick, who knows how to recommend books.

And St. Mark's, where I put more faces to names (like Jared, Farrah, Dorothea and St. Mark's).

THE MINOR TOUR, part V

2010-11-14T17:44:00.000-06:00

I recently returned from a trip through northwest Missouri and southwest Nebraska, where I read with the poets David Dodd Lee and James Shea.

In Maryville, John and Kenton showed us Robbin's Lightning Rod Factory: and also Gray's Truck Stop:

In Kansas City, Matthew and Wayne showed us Harry's and Succotash, where David ate the kitchen sink. In Lincoln, Trey and Jeff showed us the Sheldon:
and did a lovely job sticking to (then straying from) the script.

Many of the fields were brown with pale gold remnants of corn stalks. The farmhouses were mostly white. Some of them appeared partly burned and abandoned. Even the houses with cars parked in the gravel driveways looked lonely.

TATE on SARSAPARILLA

2010-10-21T23:46:00.000-05:00

James Tate read this tonight (to a completely packed house). Of course, the reading was sad, hysterical, and sad.

I could have listened for hours.

The Cowboy
(from The Ghost Soldiers, 2008)

Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was
in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who
it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the
worst sort, and up till now I had not been one of his victims, so
I kind of knew my time had come. People parked in front of my
house for hours and took pictures. I had to draw all my blinds
and only went out when I had to. Then there was a barrage of
questions. “What does he look like?" “What do you feed him?” “How
did you capture him?” And I simply denied the presence of an
extraterrestrial in my house. And, of course, this excited them
all the more. The press showed up and started creeping around
my yard. It got to be very irritating. More and more came and
parked up and down the street. Roger was really working overtime
on this one. I had to do something. Finally, I made an announcement.
I said, “The little fellow died peacefully in his sleep at 11:02
last night.” “Let us see the body,” they clamored. “He went up
in smoke instantly,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” one of them
said. “There is no body in the house or I would have buried it
myself,” I said. About half of them got in their cars and drove
off. The rest of them kept their vigil, but more solemnly now.
I went out and bought some groceries. When I came back about an
hour later another half of them had gone. When I went into the kitchen
I nearly dropped the groceries. There was a nearly transparent
fellow with large pink eyes standing about three feet tall. “Why
did you tell them I was dead? That was a lie,” he said. “You
speak English,” I said. “I listen to the radio. It wasn’t very
hard to learn. Also we have television. We get all your channels.
I like cowboys, especially John Ford movies. They’re the best,”
he said. “What am I going to do with you?” I said. “Take me
to meet a real cowboy. That would make me happy,” he said. “I
don’t know any real cowboys, but maybe we could find one. But
people will go crazy if they see you. We’d have press following
us everywhere. It would be the story of the century,” I said.
“I can be invisible. It’s not hard for me to do,” he said.
“I’ll think about it. Wyoming or Montana would be our best bet, but
they’re a long way from here,” I said. “Please, I won’t cause
you any trouble,” he said. “It would take some planning,” I said.
I put the groceries down and started putting them away. I tried
not to think of the cosmic meaning of all this. Instead, I
treated him like a smart little kid. “Do you have any sarsaparilla?”
he said. “No, but I have some orange juice. It’s good for you,”
I said. He drank it and made a face. “I’m going to get the maps
out,” I said. “We’ll see how we could get there.” When I came
back he was dancing on the kitchen table, a sort of ballet, but
very sad. “I have the maps,” I said. “We won’t need them. I just
received word. I’m going to die tonight. It’s really a joyous
occasion, and I hope you’ll help me celebrate by watching The
Magnificent Seven,” he said. I stood there with the maps in my
hand. I felt an unbearable sadness come over me. “Why must
you die?” I said. “Father decides these things. It is probably
my reward for coming here safely and meeting you,” he said. “But
I was going to take you to meet a real cowboy,” I said. “Let’s
pretend you are my cowboy,” he said.

GOLASKI on Toulouse-Lautrec

2010-10-11T11:24:00.000-05:00

The following is from Adam Golaski's excellent new book Color Plates, released this fall by Rose Metal Press

[PLATE 47]

"The Toilette"
1896

When a light caught his eye, Toulouse-Lautrec borrowed that light freely. This picture is reminiscent of numerous Degas' nude bathers--and to the good; though Degas became a terrible old man, he left many lights worth borrowing.

My girlfriend sat on the floor naked except for a white sheet bunched around her rear end and pulled over her thighs and a pair of black stockings, which were wrinkled below her knees. Her red hair was knotted at the back of her head. We'd started living together a week ago, after bumping into each other less than a month ago and reminiscing about when we'd known each other in school. We lived in a studio apartment, which was all we could afford, even with the both of us working and splitting the rent. We liked the wood floors and it came furnished with white wicker furniture. We thought the furniture was odd.

She sat very straight. I thought she was holding a yoga position, but she was too still and her face too blank. I needed my shirt for work, but my shirt was draped on the back of a chair in her sight line, and I didn't want to break her concentration, or, if not concentration, her reverie on nothing.

But I had to get dressed. I was nearly late--cutting it close because earlier she'd stopped me from getting dressed so we could move love. Though we were broke and that hung over us all the time, our relationship was still very new and so we were excited all the time, too. I got my shirt.

"Hello," she siad.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Yes." She smiled up at me. Her skin was pale and her lips were full. I thought she was quite beautiful.

"Are you thinking?"

"Not exactly. Look at the light."

I looked to where she pointed and there was a pattern of sunlight, shaped like an open book, on the wall in front of her, just below one of her easels.

"Mm-hmm," I said. "It's pretty."

"The light caught my eye so I sat here to look at it. While I did I had a daydream."

I looked at her seated cross-legged on the floor. She had small shoulders and small breasts. Her stomach was soft but small and her hips narrow. There was shadow between her legs, where she was clean shaven. I looked back at her face, at her wide eyes. I was incredibly attracted to her, pleased she was my girlfriend, but at the same time she'd done some odd things since we moved in together, things odd in a way that I could find no reference for, no connection with. I decided they were charming.

"What was your daydream about and then I have to go to work."

She rocked forward. She said: "In my daydream I was sitting on the floor just as I am. I was looking at the light on the wall and it was relaxing me. I knew I had to get dressed and get going because you had to go to work and I wanted to walk you to the train and buy a pack of cigarettes. At the same time all I wanted to do was to stay here, right here and stare at the light and relax. I began to feel this tugging then: a tugging betweeen the me who wanted to be with you and the me who wanted to be with the light."

I looked at the light again, then back at her face. She held her chin high, which exposed her long and pale neck.

"The tugging continued. It wasn't painful, exactly, but like the tug you feel when you're on Novocain and having your teeth pulled. And my skeleton started to come out of me. As if my skin was no denser than thick oatmeal, my skeleton just started to force its way out of me. Once it was completely out it sat in front of me. My skeleton was very friendly looking."

"I would imagine so." I glanced at the clock.

"We looked at each other and somehow it was decided that my skeleton would go with you to the train and get some cigarettes and come back. So, you and the skeleton went out, arm in arm just as if it were you and me going out the door. I stayed behind and looked at the light."

"Strange." I said.

"But darling, that's not all. I looked at the light and it grew cold in front of me. The light became harsh and my meditation was done for and I had an epiphany: of course, I thought. The soul is in the bones."

I didn't know what to say. But she was smiling and so pretty, I didn't worry. I reached into my pocket and took out my cigarettes. "Here," I said. "Have one of mine." She stood up and the sheet fell away. She took the cigarette, put it in her mouth and waited for me to light it. After I did she said, "You just wait a second. Let me throw on some clothes and I'll walk you."

RAPTUS

2010-09-29T08:53:00.000-05:00

This past spring the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat at a table in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art for 2 and a half months, 7 hours a day performing The Artist Is Present. At the end of the performance Abramovic sat for a little over 736 hours, the majority of which were spent gazing into the eyes of volunteer participants who sat, one at a time, in a wooden chair opposite the artist. Many of the participants were casual visitors to the museum, and seemed slightly ambivalent when first approaching. But once Abramovic greeted them with a deep bow and then met them eye-to eye, they would inevitably become very serious. Some participants sat for hours, some for minutes. Sometimes they would stand and leave the table abruptly, exiting the museum. Others stood slowly and bowed before leaving. More than a few participants, in the midst of this mutual gaze, simply broke down and began to weep, as if recognizing, in this intense yet temporary act of affirmation, they were, in their daily life, more alone than they realized.

The speaker in Joanna Klink’s Raptus manifests this very witness. Klink’s speaker is completely open to vulnerability and confronts the raw interior of a broken relationship in a broken world. While these poems explore personal and public loss, they also attend to the ways in which our perceptions (as well as the people we surround ourselves with) have the potential to deceive. In “My Enemy” Klink writes:

I had lost my way. Hardly visible by day,
I stared all fall at that old hopelessness.
Evasions and tracks. Over years
I mistook the scree for slope, the feral hours for trifles.
Love so sprang at me I forgot there should be
more than that effusion…

Though Klink’s speaker does not feign from private recriminations, she ultimately strives for compassion through an ever present attention outward. With consistently breathtaking descriptions of flora and fauna, landscape and weather, reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop’s most precise observations, Klink’s movement between interior and exterior realities allows her speaker moments of extreme awareness which accumulate to a fever pitch in the book’s final poem “Wonder of Birds.” This is a poem that underscores the generosity at the root of this book, a generosity that is perhaps informed by Allen Grossman’s suggestion that “in poetry human beings engage in the maintenance of a human world in which they can meet one another, affirm one another, see, and foresee one another.”

As if responding to Grossman’s as well as the numerous calls from those individuals struck by overwhelming isolation, loneliness and grief, Klink writes:

I believe in what is gentle in us, despite what we have done
I believe I can praise everything I am not permitted to become
I believe there is no love in blutness
But in the struggle toward attention
Which is light
You will never be alone

THE CLOUD CORPORATION

2010-09-19T18:51:00.001-05:00

SLAP MEDIA

In his poem “Chapter for Being Transformed into A Sparrow”, Donnelly’s speaker admits:

The world tries hard to bore me to death, but not hard enough.
Today it made me sit immobile in the bath-
water upwards of an hour, but the fact is, World—

I was totally into it. There’s a canker anchored
at the root of everything. Even I know that. Now what I want
is to know it better, want to know deep down

I can return to the world whatever filth I receive
without compunction.

This defiant and desperately self-assuring vision is something a contemporary skeptic not only identifies with, but trusts for the very fact that it is governed by a new kind of intelligence crystallized throughout The Cloud Corporation in passages like this, from his poem “Chapter for Being Transformed into a Lotus”:

…if suffering had to enter our house, it should have

been the kind that sang, or else the kind from which
small shapes would zoom and circle the light
hanging in the middle of the room like a thought

whose fifteen petals open and whose opening we become
custodian to, here in the lotus of half-sleep, I am
beginning to forget where a comparison falls short.

After reading a few of these poems, one is reminded how contemporary culture, despite its numerous avenues of communication, too easily isolates us from one another. So much so, that it seems we have lost the potential for life altering interactions, transformations, beginnings, becomings. In the poem “The Last Vibrations” Donnelly writes:

Through the time we made
we felt what happened dismantle into yellow
leaves thought prolonged into trembling sentences.

Thought, leaves, houses, the last vibrations
faded to be remembered, in a place we would never
finish imagining: and it was then we began.

This and other moments of linguistic agility reinforce what Richard Howard, in his introduction to Donnelly’s first book, describes as a kind of logomania. Howard writes that the poems coil about their syntax “like a sleek python of reticulated verbality.” In The Cloud Corporation, the python has not recoiled whatsoever, if anything, it has become more sensitive to formal constraints transforming each poem into a coil of exquisite thinking. But to suggest that these poems are mere “thought experiments”, is inaccurate, rather, they are more like anthems appealing to the multiple generations who have witnessed the various 21st century horrors. They are poems that appeal to those readers who are reconsidering and challenging the ethics of traditional modes of representation, ekphrasis and the creation of art itself.

At the same time, Donnelly’s poetry seizes the way life sometimes seems to drone on in a sort of dreamlike space, and then, in the very next sentence, wakes us to the terrifyingly present reality that is our life in relation to the machines that seem to be perpetuating both our misery and our joy.

PS: You should be on the lookout for David Gorin's upcoming (and illuminating) review of this book in The Believer.

ESQUE

2010-09-12T11:58:00.000-05:00

is a little bit of brilliance

3 Things

2010-09-07T22:25:00.000-05:00

1. In a recent interview, Wallace Shawn cites the interview from his book of essays during which Mark Strand admits to occasionally not understanding what something means in his own poetry. According to Shawn, Strand says this is okay because he takes comfort in realizing that his poems are "smarter" than he is, or, "ahead" of where he is.

2. In the essay "Nymph Stick Insect" Forrest Gander writes: The diagrams themselves conceived an intuition, the scribble suggests a word, one word leads to another. Sometimes an organ precedes its function. A structure arises, but becomes useful only after its development.

3. The awkward punctuation that was this "!?" is now this: its name: interrobang.

ASHBERY on REVISION (c.1983)

2010-08-25T13:22:00.000-05:00

I like the idea of being as close to the original thought or voice as possible and not to falsify it by editing. Here is something I just read by Max Jacob, quoted by André Blanchet in the notes to Jacob’s book La Défense de Tartufe. He talks about composing novels or stories in a notebook while taking long walks through Paris. I’ll translate, “The ideas I found in this way seemed sacred to me and I didn’t change a comma. I believe that prose that comes directly from meditation is a prose that has the form of the brain and which it is forbidden to touch.”

-from the 1983 Paris Review interview with Peter A. Stitt

ON THE INVISIBLE

2010-08-16T15:43:00.000-05:00

Recently, in my childhood home I found a copy of this:

in which I found this:

THIS IS WHAT MY VOICE SOUNDS LIKE

2010-08-08T00:52:00.001-05:00

This past May, I read in Cincinnati for the Bon Mot/ley Reading Series. The lovely Michael Hennessey recorded that reading and posted it here at Pennsound.

THE MINOR TOUR, part IV

2010-06-23T17:33:00.001-05:00

DEAR SAN FRANCISCO and OAKLAND,

Corner of Divisadero and California (after seeing Nabil in the Mission).

View East from Divisadero and California.

Studio One Arts Center (where I read with Craig Santos Perez). Sara Mumalo emailed the day before asking us for phone contact information in case there was an "emergency" resulting from the possible riots in response to the Mehserle trial, which is impossible.

Here is the Studio One interview with Nadelberg (who is in China).

This is the inside of the Canessa Gallery, where I read with Kisha and Aaron Shurin. The gallery walls were bare (the photo is from the 1999 installation "Rocks Scissors Paper" by Nellie K Solomon.

The old haunts, revisited.

THE MINOR TOUR, part III

2010-06-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

DEAR MISSOULA,

Even in Montana, how I long for Montana
DJD

CHARLES NORTH on MANET

2010-05-29T14:39:00.000-05:00

The whole painting is as much brushstrokes as still-life. Both the green branches with leaves and the blossoms are messy. The peony on the left is full-blown, petals splayed almost to the point of disfigurement, a flower (because we know it is; it doesn't feel like it) that has exploded from within but contained the explosion, resulting in a clump of folds, blades, blotches and points. It could also be a supernova seen through the wrong end of a telescope, or a molecule of solid light.

-from North's Ode to Asparagus, Peonies and Manet, published in 2010 by The Song Cave.

SOMETHING LOVELY IS HAPPENING...

2010-05-19T09:50:00.000-05:00

Over at SLOPE (26)

THE MINOR TOUR, part II

2010-05-15T08:43:00.000-05:00

DEAR CINCINNATI:

you will be a lonelier place when Michael and Kristi leave...

LYDIA DAVIS on AFFINITY

2010-05-04T14:52:00.000-05:00

AFFINITY

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn't read it now.

::

I might be teaching a fiction seminar next year (tentatively) titled "The Postmodern Post-Trauma". Here is the reading list as of today (with a little help from Janalyn, Kameron, and Brian from Brown):

The End of the Story, L. Davis
After The Quake, H. Murakami
Falling Man, D. DeLillo
The Road, C. McCarthy
The Mustache, E. Carrere
My Happy Life, L. Millett
Nevermore, M. Redonnet

I wonder what you might recommend...

DAWIDOFF on THE NATIONAL and GREENFIELD on MENG

2010-04-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

"...the truth is that all five live for the measure-by-measure rigor of building, tearing down and rebuilding four-minute songs. Their process often seems like a musical parlor trick since they delight in belittling their own work and can seem happier about rejecting another successful reinvention than actually completing anything."

Richard: It's like Catherine doesn't care about publication. She just sits in her room, completely dedicated to process.

IF YOU'RE ANYWHERE NEAR CHICAGO...

2010-04-22T08:41:00.000-05:00

you shouldn't miss this:

Chicago Poetry Project presents, with the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Poetry Center of Chicago

The Truth and Life of Myth A Robert Duncan Symposium

April 22-24, 2010 Chicago

“The surety of the myth for the poet has such force that it operates as a primary reality in itself, having volition. The mythic content comes to us, commanding the design of the poem; it calls the poet into action, and with whatever lore and craft he has prepared himself for that call, he must answer to give body in the poem to the formative will.”

Robert Duncan, “The Truth and Life of Myth”

Keynote speakers

Michael Palmer
“Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood”
Nathaniel Mackey
in conversation with Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary

Presenters:
Faith Barrett Stephen Collis Joseph Donahue Amy Evans
Norman Finkelstein Stephen Fredman Karl Gartung Siobhan Scarry
Margaret Sloan Brian Teare

Events include: talks and readings by the keynote speakers; a dramatic reading of Duncan’s play “Medea in Kolchis”; poetry readings by presenters; and talks, presentations, and conversation about Robert Duncan’s poetry.

Events will take place at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

in the Columbus Auditorium
280 S. Columbus Drive
Chicago, IL 60603

and

the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
5th floor, 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603

OPPEN + FOUST on THE WORD

2010-04-14T08:02:00.000-05:00

Must try to get back to what does exist (theonta)
to language which can confront, can stand.

which is not merely a series of self indulgent
gestures, indications of attitude or sentiment.

a poem may be devoted to giving clear meaning to one word.

-from G. Oppen's Selected Prose, Daybooks, And Papers, ed. by Stephen Cope

Twice, I've been evidence of,
if anything, my breathing.
Not particular, I've pissed against
a cage, pretending wind.

Swallowed whole, a songbird might
could claw back through the hawk-
or so I've thought.
The choosing of a word
might be its use, the only poem.

-from G. Foust's poem, The Sun Also Fizzles, from his book A Mouth In California

THE LOW ANTHEM

2010-04-07T08:35:00.000-05:00

A few of us drove to western Illinois to hear The Low Anthem.

Between sets, I walked the quiet streets of Rock Island. The storefronts were mostly closed, dark. In a print shop, between reams of paper towering from floor to ceiling, I could see a man hunched over a desk at the back of the store.

DAVID SIMON on NEW ORLEANS

2010-03-25T15:57:00.000-05:00

Photo: Peter van Agtmael/Magnum

"This city is capable of moments unlike any moments you'll ever experience in life. To see an Indian come down the street in full regalia on St. Joseph's Night on an unlit street of messed-up shotgun houses and one burned-out car, and he's the most beautiful thing on the planet, and everything around him is falling down. It's a glorious instant of human endeavor. It's duende from the Spanish, chills on the back of your neck, and then the next minute it's gone. Lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments. I don't mean that to sound flippant, and I don't mean it to sound more or less than what it is, but they're artists with a moment, they can take a moment and make it into something so transcendent that you're not quite sure that it happened or that you were a part of it."

-from an article by Wyatt Mason for the New York Times Magazine

THE ARTIST IS PRESENT

2010-03-25T13:33:00.000-05:00

A friend and I visited the MOMA a few weeks ago without knowing anything about Maria Abramavic's current performance, in which the artist sits at a table in silence and stares at a volunteer participant who is implored to stare back. Abramavic is performing all day, every day the museum is open between now and May 31st.

According to Foster Kramer at the Village Voice, the exhibition is "hysterical, and awesome, and bound to produce hysterically awesome results."

While I completely agree that the results are (and will be) "awesome", the performance is anything but hysterical (particularly in the context of humor, which I think Kramer is implying). While there is definitely room for humor, the underlying/overriding tone inside the relatively sterile Marron Atrium, seems to be one of reverence and seriousness. The majority of participants (visitors to the museum) seem to be slightly ambivalent when they first sit down across from Abramavic. But once she greets them with a deep bow, her head nearly touching table, then meets her participant eye-to eye, the expression on the participant's face becomes very serious (nearly as serious as the artist's).

Giacometti said the only thing distinguishing a live body from a corpse is the gaze. In this context, one might argue that Abramavic is attempting to create a space in which the gaze alone can begin to reveal (or at least suggest) a certain emotional resonance innate in the life-affirming act of the gaze. Clearly, that isn't the only argument that can be made. To begin to develop your own, you can, during museum hours, observe the performance via live stream HERE.

THE MINOR TOUR

2010-03-20T12:19:00.000-05:00

DEAR BROOKLYN, DEAR ALBANY, DEAR PROVIDENCE:

thank you for coming out to play.

JUNGJIN LEE on WIND

2010-03-01T19:44:00.000-06:00

On Saturday a friend and I visited Andrew Bae's remarkable gallery in Chicago's River North art district.

This photograph by Jungjin Lee was hanging on a wall:

Wind, 07-84

As was this:

Thing, 04-19
both of the photographs above are roughly 55" x 77"

While the verdict is still out on the simplicity of Lee's titles, the work itself is stunning. Up close, the photographs (all printed on handmade rice paper) actually look more like lead+charcoal drawings.

According to Bae, after receiving her MFA in New York, Lee was an assistant to Robert Frank, which makes sense in the context of a lot of Lee's earlier work, which we saw in a variety of mostly out of print books by Aperture. Lee's new images though, because they do seem to be attempting to blur the boundaries between photography and lead and charcoal drawings, are clearly going beyond Frank's influence.

Bae told us that he just sold a few of Lee's photographs to the MET, which we were happy to hear.

COLBY SOMERVILLE on COMMUNITY

2010-02-23T14:15:00.000-06:00

Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central-Southern Nevada ecologic and geographic distributions

careless digitization occlusive of. And I name Janice
the pressuring the little button on her SLR
in 1975. later, Emily, Rawaan, James
and Colby over tiles that are white, black and red. subsidence
craters emergent from terse epicenters of subsurface
testing, I opened/open/will open her pdf,
earlier. careless digitization occlusive of Janice's snapshots'
original clarity smudges with pixels a view of Yucca Flat.
Flat. Places, restricted access settles a thumb and Mirabilis
pudica means bashful four o'clock. Yucca
brevifolia pose in sedimentary you, 17th
January, Garfield Park Conservatory, sense-
memory rosettes of narrow but thick leaves. Opuntia
echinocarpa communities mass at points covered in points.

•

Not only is this a wildly original and challenging sonnet, I also think of it as a kind of disjunctive treatise on "community" around which many young poets currently living in Iowa City (and beyond) might gather.

Which is all to say (thanks in part to the ANTHOLOGY Reading Series) in these first six months of living here I've learned that IC's writing community is nothing if not vibrant, welcoming and completely and beautifully diverse.

FATHERS/FIGURES/FORTUITY

2010-02-13T08:54:00.000-06:00

These Three Things:

1. Recently, I spent 48 hours reading McCarthy's THE ROAD.

2. For the past nine months I've been investigating the human and non-human "figure" and its relation to form (in poetry and elsewhere), and the myriad states of existence and deterioration to which the figure is prone.

3. Two days ago, unaware of #2, my father sent me these sketches he'd just made.

DELEUZE & GUATTARI on MOTIF & REFRAIN

2010-02-04T10:53:00.000-06:00

"It has often been noted that the spider web implies that there are sequences of the fly's own code in the spider's code; it is as though the spider had a fly in its head, a fly 'motif', a fly 'refrain'. The implication may be reciprocal, as with the wasp & orchid...von Uexkull has elaborated an admirable theory of transcodings. He sees the components as melodies in counterpoint, each of which serves as a motif for another: Nature as music...Whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the constitution of a new plane as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage or bridging."

CHICAGO

2010-01-29T15:14:00.000-06:00

Two readings in two nights in the city that has always had my heart--now more than ever.

The first occurred Wednesday at Danny's, where I read with the poet Catherine Theis, who concluded her reading with some incredible excerpts from a play in verse she is working on.

The second took place Thursday at the Goethe Institut. Christian Hawkey introduced the poets Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck; two German poets whose work is featured with five other poets from Berlin in the latest issue of the Chicago Review.

Here is one of Rinck's fine poems (trans. by Nicholas Grindell and reprinted from the Chicago Review):

to you i write, oh star

picture this, implosions, and then the explosion,
your radiance, then how quickly you cool off,
dearest you want to get away from me, how bright
you are on the last day, then the wind grabs you,
acceleration most obscure, now a cloud, no,
a ribbon of gas and somewhere else,
far far far away, someone stands at a telescope
and uses your demise to calculate the distance
to faraway galaxies, while you, as a supernova,
enter a vortex where no light is, where nothing is,
where no escape is either, nor dreams no more,
how shall i, i ask you, how shall i, shall i then

And then these lucky lucky! book trades at Danny's:

"Whenever his baggy pants and his sensible white shoes met them, which wasn't what they loved, his red hands and silver rings flew. Very often I remember being kind of loved. How he alone loved me terribly and shocked me. How he spoke of love when speaking of laws." --from IOWA, by Travis Nichols

If you are a girl
say something.
I want to know
what your country is like.
If you are a girl
you are without a country.
If you were a country
I would raise you.
If you were a country
I would be so soft with you.
If you are a country
say something.
If you were my country
I would call you out.
--from Natural Intelligence, by Monica Fambrough

KALAMAZOO

2010-01-18T08:11:00.000-06:00

Thanks to everyone who came to the reading at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center this Saturday. It was especially rewarding to hear Cindy St. John read this:

"the smack of little bodies in mid-air collisions satisfies me as we watch bats swing out from underneath Congress Bridge at dusk, like a hand slaps still water or like a tongue, hair whipped taut in the wind-it's no little violence excites me, the sound of two bats, echolocation gone terribly wrong, the opposite of rustling paper in the crowd everyone is visiting but I live here. Lately, I've been trying to tell the truth and the truth is I don't know what to say so I just repeat "okay" on the phone or at dinner or as I lean half my body over the bridge railing when I mean anything but ambivalence-wouldn't it just be easier if I could throw my body smack against someone else's if tiny particles of me would stick to his shirt and like synchronized swimmers spell the letters of the language of what I mean, okay, let's just bounce off each other. Fuck it. Let's get bloody break some teeth and some furniture after all, Brakhage said that sound is a blind alley sound is an aesthetic error and summer is almost over so let's steal some wings and leave a trail of road-kill all the way down to Mexico"

which is from her 2009, Effing Press chapbook, city poems.

On the five hour drive back to IC, I listened to this cd on repeat (track 11 made my heart big--listen here):

SOME THINGS I HAVE RECENTLY SEEN

2010-01-08T20:45:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Callan

In Atlanta the last week of December, we visited the High Museum's "Da Vinci: Hand of the Genius". After walking through we felt slightly misled as there seemed to be relatively few of Da Vinci's original drawings and sculpture compared to the vast number of pieces by Da Vinci's contemporaries. Of these, the most remarkable by far, was Rustici's "John the Baptist with the Pharisee and the Levite":

The experience was further enhanced after being reminded that John the Baptist is saying "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness," which I love and hate for the simple fact that this additional "data" contributes significantly to my sense of empathy (as if the statues weren't enough). And there is also a puzzling juxtaposition between the sheer immensity of John the Baptist and the sense of helplessness implicit in the word "crying".

Elsewhere in the museum, we enjoyed a series of 16 photographs by William Christenberry called "Building, Hale County AL., 1967-2000", which basically chronicles the ruin and rebirth of a single building over a 50 year period.

Last but not least, we saw three little gems by the British artist Jonathan Callan, whom, in addition to his well-known book arts (see above) has done some erasures of photographs. "Jerusalem", Jonathan Callan

And while we're on the subject of seeing: if I could live in San Francisco, it would be here: John Berggruen Gallery

FAIRFIELD PORTER on LARRY RIVERS

2010-01-01T14:43:00.000-06:00

Portrait of Birdie, Number II, 1953

"Art gives him psychological power. It serves as a way of finding those distinctions that appear to be the true ones in the search for his life. His self-control stems from conscious spontaneity and constant awareness."

-from Porter's "Larry River's Paints A Picture".

ELISABETH BENJAMIN::THE HOUSES

2009-12-09T09:23:00.000-06:00

If you've ever been far away from those you've loved, you'll like this chapbook.

Visit The Catenary Press to read an excerpt and purchase.

AGNES MARTIN on DOING WHAT YOU WERE BORN TO DO

2009-12-08T17:54:00.000-06:00

PRAIRIE

2009-12-04T12:47:00.000-06:00

Thank you to everyone who came to the reading Wednesday at Prairie Lights.

And thanks to Melanie Noel, whose voice is solace.

Before the reading, my father made the sketch that appears above.

JOHN ASHBERY on MARIANNE MOORE

2009-11-22T16:14:00.000-06:00

"I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet."

***

Trying to open locked doors with a sword, threading
the points of needles, planting shade trees
upside down; swallowed by the opaqueness of one whom the seas

love better than they love you, Ireland-

you have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.

from Moore's SOJOURN IN THE WHALE

THE SHAPE IS SPACE (part 2)

2009-10-25T16:42:00.000-05:00

Last night, twenty five people sat in a circle in our living room and read, from start to finish, Karena Youtz's THE SHAPE IS SPACE (Privity Press, 2008).

Ten copies of the book were available for purchase. Some people paid with dollars, some with notes and pine cones dotted with sugar. Another person paid with this:

*drawing by Rawaan Alkhatib*

For an hour, strangers read to strangers an entire book whose author was 1500 miles away.

READING LISTENING WATCHING

2009-10-07T11:28:00.001-05:00

SLOPE is taking the online publishing world into beautiful places.

TO LAKE ERIE FROM LAKE ERIE :: I WISH YOU WERE HERE

2009-09-15T09:30:00.001-05:00

This is going to be happening in Iowa City/Cleveland at 10:30am on Saturday, October 3rd as part of the 2009 Works in Progress Festival:

(Grandparents Saluting the Sea)

PROJECT TITLE:

TO LAKE ERIE FROM LAKE ERIE or I WISH YOU WERE HERE

LOGISTICS:

I will be using two laptop computers, each equipped with SKYPE. One computer will be with me in Cleveland, OH on the shores of Lake Erie and the other will be set up to a projector at the Iowa City Public Library which will broadcast a live reading of five texts from five different poets.

PROGRAM NOTES:

The images and sounds broadcast back to Iowa City and the WiP Festival will be delivered live from the shores of Lake Erie. The texts that are being read from Lake Erie are also addressed to Lake Erie. This project considers the consequences of departure, arrival, integration and reintegration, as well as explorations of the limited and limiting definitions of “audience” and “reader” in the context of the traditional structures that persist in most reading venues today. Additionally, as a new resident of the Midwest (from the Pacific Northwest, a region that helped sustain me physically, emotionally and artistically) I wish to explore how voluntary departures and subsequent arrivals (and departures-within-arrivals; ie: Iowa City to Cleveland) feel like segmentations of awareness. Thus, the delivery of these five texts through my own body and throat is an attempt to move beyond the need to feel as though I am “comfortable” in this new place and toward an appreciation for the fact that these texts (as they are delivered) inhabit/deliver me. To this end I hope to create some semblance of symmetry around the edges of unease; here and not here, having arrived and arrived nowhere.

LABOR DAY

2009-09-07T17:45:00.000-05:00

The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind
playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.

-H.D.

Today, on the shores of Lake Macbride we sat in a bird blind and watched dozens of cardinals and nuthatches come and go from the feeders hanging on wires between the trees.

Then we walked down a path and saw an adult bald eagle inside its cage. It looked at us, then looked away.

ROBERT D. RICHARDSON on the DETAILS of ALICE JAMES' FINAL RESTING PLACE

2009-08-22T23:23:00.001-05:00

"Alice's body was cremated. Katharine Loring carried the ashes back across the Atlantic, where they were placed in the Cambridge Cemetery lot with her father and mother, in order, as Henry said, that she not become a myth. In the year ahead, William would design a monument for her grave...

...One the side of the monument were to be the emblems from Henry Senior's family seal, on one side a serpent with its tail in its mouth, on another a jar with a butterfly escaping."

LUCAS FARRELL on GEOSMIN

2009-07-16T14:59:00.000-05:00

When I speak and nothing happens,
nothing changes, my very very bird.
My mnemonic sweat laps against the window slats
in the dream of another's making.
Place your forehead against my forehead and we'll
see who sweats first.

You can (and should) read the rest of Mr. Farrell's poem in the latest issue of the Boston Review.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

2009-07-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

Are not buildings completed
before works of art break off an if
in the middle region where
whereness commences a reign...

Barbara Guest

Maggie and Jacob: July 4th 2009

ROBERT DUNCAN on MONMOUTH, OREGON

2009-07-01T10:29:00.000-05:00

I was excited to see a copy of this at the Book Bin in Salem, Oregon:

and equally excited to see this as I opened the book:

I also found this catalogue for Giacometti's 1965 MOMA Exhibition, with an introduction by Peter Selz and dozens of color plates:

to PORTLAND via BOISE with these four BOOKS

2009-06-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

In the city on the moor
words bound from their mouths,
tumble each
other over
to fill the gaps
with explosions.

-Eleanor Rees
from Tell me something of this

Wonders, it would seem, only that
the mind is still
connected, interweaving oceans, ornaments.

The force of fire, passing through the
fissures in soft stone,
sets it afire.

-Keith Waldrop
from Pozzolana

fire-hollowed house, the
lawn laden
with nameless blossoms

-Joseph Massey
from Bramble (a gathering of loons)

you, on paper, vex
me, in flesh:
which of us is here?

-Jared Stanley
from Goodwill Lunes

Robert Pogue Harrison on Rilke (+description)

2009-05-27T16:34:00.000-05:00

On August 1st we move to Iowa City.

So, about a month ago, during a visit to look for a place to live, we walked into Iowa City's public library (I would live there if they'd let me).

The following passage from Robert Pogue Harrison's stunning The Dominion of the Dead reminds me of that first visit to the library (Harrison is describing a portion of Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge):

"Malte...is lodged in a shoddy room, but he is in every other respect homeless, which is why the beggars, prostitutes, and street vagabonds seem to recognize him as one of their own--an outcast. Malte has a refuge from the street life of the city, however. It is the public library, whose glass door he opens 'as if I were at home,' and whose books offer him a place to dwell in..." (p44).

Later in the chapter, Harrison reprints a healthy portion of what he calls "descriptive virtuousity...unmatched in all of modern literature" from the same Rilke text:

"And from these walls once blue and green and yellow, which were framed by the fracture-tracks of the demolished partitions, the breath of these lives stood out--the clammy, sluggish, musty breath, which no wind had yet scattered. There stood the middays and the sicknesses and the exhaled breath and the smoke of years, and the sweat that breaks out under armpits and makes clothes heavy, and the stale breath of mouths, and the fusel odor of sweltering feet. There stood the tang of urine and the burn of soot and the grey reek of potatoes, and the heavy, smooth stench of ageing grease. The sweet-lingering smell of neglected infants was there, and the fear-smell of children who go to school, and the sultriness out of the beds of nubile youths. To these was added much that had come from below, from the abyss of the street, which reeked, and more that had oozed down from above with the rain, which over the cities is not clean."

I tend to agree with Harrison (and not just on this). I have never read a description of a one-dimensional surface (such as a wall) that, in the end, provides such a richly textured depth.

Is the ultimate task then to employ a description that appeals to multiple senses so that readers experience, in their mind's eye, a multidimensional "image"?

And yet, I wouldn't dare call The fear-smell of children...an "image".

This may go without saying, but I think one of the reasons Rilke's passage is so appealing is because it seems to be oscillating between what the speaker has actually seen and what he has imagined. I can't help but think now of B. Guest (whose Collected just came in the mail).

Six years ago, a teacher of mine said to a classroom full of students: "in poetry, the image is dead".

I wonder who killed it? And why?

A GIFT

2009-05-08T13:21:00.000-05:00

We received a gift in the mail from our friend Elizabeth, who writes poems, prints them out on paper, cuts the paper into small pieces, then wraps the pieces of poem within layers of multi-colored crepe paper. As you unwrap the crepe paper ball, a piece of the poem reveals itself. Also embedded inside the poem-ball: pieces of candy and a party popper.

...the habitation
of snow, a
square

cut into
the four
quadrants of the compass

and spun in place

late,
turned back to

the no turning back...

THE SHAPE IS SPACE

2009-04-27T10:31:00.000-05:00

Midnight struck in the soul.
I stood alone in a stone room
among the dead...Could I talk with the dead?
Who is moving the shadows?
The pageant gets

not negative but neutral
Among the dead become comfortable
Could we speak there is nothing to manage.

________

Did you know men
kill each other on purpose?
Why do I remember?
To touch my friend's arm

________

The mustard seed story reveals six billion times more suffering
________

...I have flawed compassion
We haven't similarly agreed
to beauty...organic structure
like a bird singing "broken to be made"

-from Karena Youtz's The Shape Is Space (Privity Press, 2008).

These are not poems. This is poetry.

If six billion people read this book, compassion might become oxygen and each moment of private suffering would be overcome by that which is expelled, breath by breath, line by line.

In the end, it is not sympathy one feels, but kinship to those who have witnessed the two blackbirds fighting on the sidewalk; kinship to those who realize they are not only implicated in the image of the struggling birds, but their motivations. Is one clearly the victim? Is one clearly the offender? And who, in the end, is orchestrating?

Sawako Nakayasu + Metcalf Goose

2009-04-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

::METCALF WILDLIFE REFUGE VISITOR'S CENTER::

Robert Kelly on Guy Davenport

2009-03-03T11:23:00.000-06:00

Some of his young men got him to go to Greece by essentially saying, “You know, we’ve heard all this Socratic, Hellenic stuff, now come bathe with us naked”—and he did, and they celebrated that, but I think he was glad to get home. He was a man of American tastes, in his personal life: simple food and simple clothing. On the way over here to see you, you know we passed a Davenport nursery. That was a good omen. He once told me about how he had a nanny who took him out into the woods whenever he was colicky and fed him blue clay. This nanny knew where the blue clay was. And this business of earth-eating, geophagy, is a big part of Southern medicine, and it was something that Davenport felt was very defining for him because the “geography of the imagination” is also the “geophagy of the imagination,” in the way he has eaten the earth. His first experience of recovery from illness came from eating the blue earth. (The Brooklyn Rail, 2005)

SHANE McCRAE at the Empty Bottle

2009-02-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

I heard Shane McCrae read from his chapbook One Neither One (Octopus Books, 2009) at the Empty Bottle in Chicago last week. Shane reads his poems with such delicacy and tenderness that I think his reading took the massive crowd by surprise. For a full ten-minutes they seemed rapt by the music of a poetry revealing an ear finely tuned to a pitch both pleasant and startling:

White ghosts and can't imagine a black ghost / Black sheet who surely also die
and die / Younger more frequently in cities in
The country in this country surely...

(from "Ghosts")

The subject matter in One Neither One is anything but sweet; five of the seven poems are titled "Mulatto".

Not in between the only mule at the school

Across the street but there was one black girl
And one black boy much older boy forgot
Him but the girl called me a nigger let
The white boys touch the breasts she didn't have...

Once, Shane explained to me a fairly complex formal strategy regarding meter and the line in many of the poems from his full-length manuscript (which, at the time was titled Mule). I've sworn to secrecy, but I think that when these structures and strategies are finally revealed, they will be widely emulated for their startling and beautiful appeals to logic and sound.

In addition to explorations of naming, childhood, race and slavery, all seven poems reveal Shane's talents as a master-technician. Because the work itself is so well constructed and the subject(s) so incredibly necessary, it is safe to say that Shane's is a poetry that is not only important, but arresting.

Robert Hughes on Morandi

2009-02-09T09:24:00.000-06:00

Modestly, insistently, Morandi's images try to slow the eye, asking it to give up its inattention, its restless scanning, and to give full weight to something small. When Japanese aesthetes spoke of the quality called wabi, they had in mind something like this: the clarity of ordinary substance seen for itself, in its true quality. Chardin had this most of the time, and Vermeer nearly all the time...and Morandi's entire life was predicated on the prolonged search for it. (Time, 1981)

James Lord on Giacometti

2009-01-07T01:33:00.000-06:00

Since he had begun to feel that he might never succeed in sculpting a head to his satisfaction, Alberto decided to try making a complete figure. Working directly in plaster, he started with a figure about 18 inches high, representing a nude woman standing with her arms at her sides. As he worked, he found to his amazement, and to his consternation, that the sculpture grew smaller and smaller. The smaller it grew the more troubled the he became; yet he could not keep it from shrinking. The sculpture itself seemed to have determined in advance its appropriate size, would accept no other, and compelled the sculptor to comply. After several months of work, the figure had shrunk to the size of a pin, standing in precarious isolation upon a pedestal several times its own height. Those dimensions were intolerable to the artist, but the likeness he sought seemed somehow attached to the tiny size of the sculpture.

Bewildered, alarmed, he began again with a figure the same size as the first. Again it shrank while he worked on it, growing smaller and smaller despite his reluctance and distaste, finally ending as tiny as the first. Again he began. Again the outcome was the same. However, he could not stop. Sometimes the figure grew so miniscule that a last touch of the sculptor’s knife would send it crumbling into dust. He was working at the limit of being and on the frontier of non-being, confronted with the sudden passing of existence into nonexistence, a transition which took place in his hands but over which he had no control. For twenty years, he had been obsessed with life’s frailty. Now it presided over his work. In a very real sense, it became his work. “I always have the impression or the feeling of the fragility of living beings, as if at any moment it took a fantastic energy for them to remain standing, always on threatened by collapse. And it is in their frailty that my sculptures are likenesses.” (Giacometti, 177-178)