December 2011
49 posts
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pure angst
return of old fantasies, long-dormant. imagine graphic injuries done to specific people, for the first time since my sister was an infant. back then I wondered what it meant that I should see so often in my mind’s eye her screaming head reduced to bloody rubble by a wall; now I know that these dead customers, their frozen gapes and chair-impaled eye-sockets, don’t mean a thing, really. at...
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“O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, / Lend me a little tobacco-shop, /...”
– From Ezra Pound, “The Lake Isle”
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“love song for petal” (sketch)
...
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btw
in case you were wondering here is the first solitude
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THE SECOND SOLITUDE
I woke on the frigid round grass of a clearing, dominated by a single towering pylon, wrought of iron, criss-crossed by supports and strewn with transformers—but not a wire leading to, nor trailing from its lone colossal form among the trees
no path out of the clearing I could see, but only tree that clung to tree with bony limbs, like lovers in a frost
until the wind’s direction changed, and,...
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arose
for a long time, I went to words lightly, slipping nimbly back and forth between ideas, feelings, imagos and things —what I mean to say is that I did not pay enough attention to what you always failed to mention
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on boxing day
O will she said we never reach an end, an end to images, this sick all-overness, this making of my mind a spiders’ nest, and life a wait for flies?
For my part, as casual as a wink/an insect’s wing/a breeze I pictured me a clearing where the trees bowed down like dead men,
come whoever may. I waited, I would realize later, not for love of bugs or anyone, but for the raising of the...
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“My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at...”
– Morton Feldman, as quoted by Alex Ross (via whenyrlivinginafascistdream)
hahaha this is great
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on christmas
as if by some miraculous and mutual agreement, all permitted all to witness one another’s happiness— not to say their smiles, necessarily; some did not smile, merely carried selves or loads a little lighter down the sidewalk to the parking lot
as if to say, the year was long, but this!—this, proud, we have maintained that from its place within our gardens holding forth, eternal...
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(COVER) — wild flag, “endless talk”
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(COVER) — modest mouse, “bankrupt on...
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blood letter opener
you put it all down in the shape of a pad
or a walk, or some rocks, or a post-office box
and you boil it down to the simple, the skeletal—the way that I discovered, just the other day, of washing grapes:
you move your hand in circles gently agitate and press and roll the grapes against the inside of the bowl
until the stems detach and float intact up to the surface like the bones of birds (but...
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seen from outside
the lamplight in the window of the room it is impossible to prove is empty —nevertheless, it is empty
-ing like a stomach, mind, but faster, the contents of the day from all their pouches do disclose the door in
-side this house, a forest or a labyrinth of memories:
this morning, driving north, sandwiched between pink clouds that streaked the sun and last evaporating blues of night, riding...
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christmas card,
or,
“I AM,” I SAID TO NO-ONE, “THERE”
It has grown too cold for deer; the ones around here have surely moved on, or else been devoured by the insatiable wolves of december. I fly down the roads recklessly, my uncapped hair screaming out into the night like a cat which has nearly lost its life. I will have to cut it soon.
Having all the day long felt the day escape me as a drink of wine held in...
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HUNGOVER COVERS: “okkervil river...
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NEW SONG ‘I did not get lost’
...
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“The huntsmen are up in America […] and they are already past their first...”
– Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus (cited in W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn [trans. Michael Hulse])
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(COVER) cat power, “metal heart”
...
TO DO LIST:
—oh crap I forgot what I was gonna write
"we knew in a month that it wasn't Indians, we...
raptoravatar:
Louis C.K.
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for a long day I went to bed early
do you realize I said him returning bescrunching his face in confusion what I just did?
—I gave you the keys to my soul
it took a second but he smiled and understood said I ought to try that on a girl
that’s poetry like dancing a certain learned awkwardness testifying, nonetheless to pleasant spirits present in our midst
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TODAY ON “30-MINUTE COVERS I RAN HOME DURING...
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“Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around...”
– Nicholson Baker on copying out passages of your favorite books by hand (via austinkleon)
(I do this all the time, and it really is the best
writing is a craft like any other, and it helps sometimes to trace over the fine lines of someone else’s work)
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“That everything is so “complicated,” that ‘I’ may be...”
– Gilles Deleuze, ‘Phantasm & Modern Literature’ (in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, p.298)
rmxbb: more lana del rey -- hey guess what? don... →
theremixbaby:
True, “Video Games” is possibly an indictment of inattentive boyfriends (it is also possibly the hipster version of a Cosmo magazine article on “How To Please Your Man”). [… But] Lana Del Rey doesn’t want to submit to a ‘strong’ man*. She wants someone to love her, to pay some attention to her, to invest as much in their relationship as she does. She tries to use ...
Eating Poetry: Acquainted with the Night →
eating-poetry:
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped…
this really is the best poem
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EVERYDAY I’M BLUESIN’
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I RIFFed again, →
if you’re into that sort of thing—I know I am!
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new song/fragment — ‘short day drive’
...
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THE FIRST SOLITUDE (cont.)
… The next thing I recall, I was upon a bright and unfamiliar threshold, peering down the halls, which seemed to spiral, crashing into walls, I somehow felt my way into the bathroom, stood before the mirror, paused, and saw no thing there I could recognize:
the frame by monstrous bars disfigured as by fingers, placed over the eyes
reminds me of a story I remember reading, cited in a book,...
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THE FIRST SOLITUDE
… that saw a vision I decline to paraphrase
transmitted, as I stood, transfixed in congress with the stately ancient pines that speake to me by keeping silent
far, far from the road—I had mistaken Nature’s muteness for an invitation,
wandered over brambled hills, and shaded vales, and highways fair, and seen the face of Death laid bare in tragicomic overtures
till, banishing all thinking...
YEA YEA u kno I be readin dis mallarme shit, ‘A la nue accablante…’ and all that
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?
pretty dumb, on face, this language full of holes, this measure-throttled tongue, this useless thing that tries to shrink and shove its way into the gaps around my teeth, an awful bloody seedling taking root:
why should the poem not become a space for telling who can do what to themselves? a list of groceries? or the faded trace of some forgotten creatures’ morning run, whose rhythms on the page...
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(can you tell I’m not really happy about...
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a quick/sloppy one cuz I’m baout to get...
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tell it to your blog
there is in trees a choking aspect:
roots on roots unto eternity
—but also leaves, flat and orderly,
enough of them to suffocate the earth
so winters fell in myriads,
so all-at-once, so domino-unlike:
the Winter of Forgetfulness the Winter of Fatigue the Winter of Alternatives the Winter of Vague Sexual Ideas the Winter of Los the Winter of Stuck Behind the Winter of Going Unnoticed Again
...
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epilog
my friends, I sleep no sleep of yours—no, no such kind of thing as that,
but constant waking dreads and half-formed thoughts as runny as an egg
(a certain one, bedecked with certain condiments I draw from sketchy pantries of my memory)
I shudder (to remember) and I bend the blanket over
(change the meaning to whatever)
put up my forcefield hide in the catbox do or do not remove my hat
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(NEW SONG) “wavelike blues”
the...
although it's kind of weird to think
that ghostwriter was using the television to teach us to read (in more senses than one)
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from Donald Barthelme's "The Crisis" (1979)
—What have the rebels captured thus far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery. The rebels have entered the cages of the tamer animals and are playing with them, gently.
[…]
—The rebels have eaten all the grass on the spacious lawns surrounding the President’s heart. That vast organ, the president’s heart, beats now on a bald plain.
[…]
—Rebel T-shirts, camouflaged as ordinary...
