2024-03-17

 

[ Memory of a Dream March 15, 1919 ; Charles Burchfield ]



2024-03-15

 
--Robert Duncan

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says   
that animals have no need of speech and Nature   
abhors the superfluous.   My cat is fluent.   He   
converses when he wants with me.   To speak

is natural.   And whales and wolves I’ve heard   
in choral soundings of the sea and air
know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs   
my mind and heart—they touch the soul.   Here

Dante’s religion that would set Man apart   
damns the effluence of our life from us   
to build therein its powerhouse.

It’s in his animal communication Man is   
      true, immediate, and   
in immediacy, Man is all animal.

His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony,
      old circuits of animal rapture and alarm,
attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives.
      He hears
particular voices among
      the concert, the slightest   
rustle in the undertones,
      rehearsing a nervous aptitude   
yet to prove his. He sees the flick
      of significant red within the rushing mass
of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow
      of a green shirt
to delite him in a glowing field of green
      —it speaks to him—
and in the arc of the spectrum color   
      speaks to color.
The rainbow articulates
      a promise he remembers   
he but imitates
      in noises that he makes,

this speech in every sense   
the world surrounding him.
He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace
      amidst the savory mass,
and taste in evolution is an everlasting key.
      There is a pun of scents in what makes sense.

      Myrrh it may have been,
the odor of the announcement that filld the house.

      He wakes from deepest sleep   

upon a distant signal and waits   

      as if crouching, springs

      to life.


2024-03-13

 
--Emily Lee Luan

is the bleat of the sandhill crane
is the hush of the autonomous mind        of the flame above the canyon
is the cow drinking water from mud          is the cow and the word cow
is the deckled face in the overhang of stone
is the bone weathered into wood
is the wood weathered to stone
is the sentence
is the moment that longs to be the sentence hidden in a sentence
is the legislated road         is the grass is the grass
is the nerve that runs from socket to wrist
is the common knowledge of aperture and speed
is the hole to be yawned into         its origin         the stone that says
the impulse of water         is the moss against
is the growing in spite of


2024-03-11

 
--Jay Wright

The pentatonic spring washes its winter clothes.
Five is a difficult color—
not this green of reflected sky, nor the red
clamor of midnight riding by on a church bell.
Think of the Greek of it,
an Egyptian river,
the dry desert voice you hear in the cleansing.
All before this moment found its own measure,
an ingenious inganno, a blessure
occasioned by a consonant's turmoil,
a Germanic algebra brightly a-boil
through all the strings, a fortspinning always pure,
always a public shrine to a wood secure
in its origin.
                            White is a difficult
sound in the edowa above the tumult
fastened to the soul of widows, magnitude
that arms the darkest nebula. The rude
dead awaken to another baptism.

2024-03-09

 
[ Untitled ; Pierre Roy ]



2024-03-03

 
Haiku- Winter 2023/2024


a lack of sunshine
gradually again replaced
by rain and then snow


another new year,
all that sweet melancholy
is getting so old


hard arctic freeze-
my backdoor
froze shut


leaving the warm bed
unraveled and was perfect
for the winter blues



2024-02-29

 
Delimitation

How was it? And how is it? The perpetual birthday of one
that is personally yours and yours to have as needed.
As many as you might like to fully arrive back to the brand new.
A clearing after replacing and forever losing the birthday
never asked for, the one that was the year's or theirs
and not to be much more, back when you were young but once.
Which is now gone. And now the choice to be old again,
again and again. What follows, what's held off, and waits
for experience to reveal those extended ages and then
the light that arrives as your air takes to breathe in the barren,
so you can say this is okay, while you walk in the midst of waking
through the no longer not too far off distance of evening, that arises
after the new year is never ever new but always instead, anew--
as lone wind is understood, when finally here as you always were.



2024-02-27

 
[ Tree Trunks ; Léon Spilliaert ]


2024-02-25

 
--Chelsea Woodard
       
Wide-lobed threes of trillium leaves taped
and labeled, trifoliate veins, wrinkles dried
and finite as her penciled marks beneath.
My hands are attuned to the weight of pages pressed
long on such fragile anatomies—pistils of lilies,
cowslip petals, delphinium halos and bright spikes
of iris, ovaries and ovules tenderly picked,
patterned and splayed. I know the body

of desire could fill a book and still spill
out. It isn't a question of will, or killing
for pleasure, for beauty that's flattened and lasts past
the end of one season, where we've lived in bloom
and hate to leave. Late February casts
its defeatist light and I quit this reliquary now, this room.


2024-02-23

 

ENVOI

In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
   To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,
   Only the song of a secret bird.

--from 'A Ballad of Dreamland'; Algernon Charles Swinburne



2024-02-21

 
Exquisite loneliness
Bound of mine own caprice
I fly on the wings of an unknown chord
That ye hear not,
Can not discern
My music is weird and untamed
Barbarous, wild, extreme,
I fly on the note that ye hear not
On the chord that ye can not dream.

from “Anima Sola”; Ezra Pound



2024-02-19

 
--Wang Wei
(trans. by Wong May)

You said dismount
& have a drink

We stood
You unsaddled your discontent

&  I  took your offer of wine

Down South you said
You saw
A bed
By the mountainside

               But why ask why
Start out
               Friend 
          White clouds come 
          We   pass   on  by

 

2024-02-17


[ Pawel Kuczynski ]



2024-02-15

 
--Jack Collom

Why & what is sweetness all alone?
Either that or it becomes, alas, fleeting,
Which actually helps, because of rhythm.
& there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter
How pale it is on the levels we receive on.
I mean, the minute you invent a time interval
The more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation
Of accidents; zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.”
            After a while, we almost expect him or her
To inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers.
It’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell
Which nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it,
Although that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified
By its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?


2024-02-13

 
From a January 13, 2013 interview with Jack Collom (OmniVerse):

ER: I’ve heard you say many times that nature is comprehensive, that nature is EVERYTHING. That sense of inclusiveness manifests in this book in a way that really reflects your attitudes. Could you cite an example from the book that shows how you perceive such expansiveness?

JC: I’ve been playing a lot with this little string of definitions. Jonathan Skinner was talking with me about how Timothy Morton and some other ecologists want to abolish the word “nature” because it’s become debased, abused, sentimentalized, perverted even. But what I would like is to let the meanings proliferate, even the pile-up of contradictions that come with different definitions. Contradictions are important, by the way, because nature is full of contradictions when you look close.

I mean, we wouldn’t, I think, change “I love you” to “I experience interpersonal gravitation in regard to you,” although “love” has been debased and corrupted.

In the preface at some point I have a few nature definitions listed, and I’ll just read them to you:

Nature is everything and something.

It’s the ocean in which culture swims.

It’s that which is not manufactured.

It’s a stick, a ladybug.

OOOoooooooooooo.

It’s its logic.

It’s causal essence.

It’s a lost purity.

It’s a rose and it’s a photographed rose.

It’s the desire to smash something. Therefore it’s an entity of great simultaneous scale. We need to be in touch with these to some degree all at once.

Incidentally, what I’ve been doing in my current writing in the last couple of weeks—I’ve been trying to make an expanded list of “Nature is,” of really expanded scale. It’s difficult to be selective and still convey infinity.

ER: Along with being encompassing—nature and its great simultaneous scale—what comes through so strongly here is this sense of play. Nature plays amid us, among us, with us. I can’t think of your writing without thinking of the play, whimsy and humor of it. How do humor and nature interrelate or interact?

JC: Yeah. I think play represents freedom from one’s own preconceptions. I think humor is just accuracy. Humor’s mechanical basis is incongruity, and when you look close anywhere, in nature and anywhere else, if there is anywhere else, there is a lot of incongruity. I think the universe is very funny. It’s just seeing that first you have one thing and then another thing too, and there are many ways in which they are mismatched. We tend to slur over these processes and get overviews too quickly, too simply for an overall idea of what we are looking at.

2024-02-11

 
February
--Jack Collom

It is all kind of lovely that I know
what I attend here now the maturity of snow
has settled around forming a sort of time
pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine

in any colors to be chosen and
everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen

soon enough
the primary rough
erosion of what white fat it will occur
     stiff yellows O
beautiful beautifully austere
     be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that
             would promote to, but

now I know my own red
network electrifying this welcome annual hush.



2024-02-09

 
[ Pot, Glass and Book ; Pablo Picasso (1908) ]


2024-02-07

 
--Jack Spicer

A Translation for Robert Jones

A diamond
Is there
At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness
And there is nothing in the universe like diamond
Nothing in the whole mind.

The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean.

A dog howls at the moon
A dog howls at the branches
A dog howls at the nakedness
A dog howling with pure mind.

I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly.

The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond
Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the
       waves are.
The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with
       my nakedness
And there is nothing in the universe like diamond
Nothing in the whole mind.


2024-02-05

 
--Jack Spicer

Hush now baby don't say a word
Mama's going to buy you a mocking bird
The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down
and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting
for an absent savior. The third
Joyful mystery.
If the mocking bird don't sing
Mama's going to buy you a diamond ring
The diamond ring is God, the mocking bird the Holy Ghost.
The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down
and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting
for an absent savior.


2024-02-03

 
--Jack Spicer

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
    water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.



2024-02-01

 

[ Winter Impression I ; Marta Zamarska (2014) ]


2024-01-30

 

--Ted Berrigan

The pregnant waitress asks
"Would you like
some more coffee?"
Surprised out of the question
I wait  seconds  "Yes,
I think I would!" I hand her
my empty cup, &
"thank you!" she says. My pleasure.





2024-01-28

 
-Ted Berrigan

Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.
 
Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.
 
Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were
                                                     five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.
 
Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner
                                                who sat at my lunch table
                                                    in High School……car crash…...1954.
 
Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School,
                                       Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.
 
Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.
 
Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window
     in 1963.
 
Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing
                                the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital
                                during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.
 
Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.
 
Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.
 
Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night
                                       in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.
 
Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor
                                    Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.
 
Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.
 
My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.


2024-01-26

 
--Ted Berrigan

for Sandy

Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o'clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists, compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock       RenÈ
Rilke       Benedict Arnold       I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems, or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black, and blue.       Bosky.       Oubliette.       Dis-
severed. And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 pm. It is time to steal books. It’s
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalpyse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

my heart still loves, will break.



2024-01-24


[ Footprints In The Snow ; Alfred Freddy Krupa (2016) ]



2024-01-22

 


--Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.




2024-01-20

 

--Charles Bertram Johnson 

All day the clouds
   Grow cold and fall,
And soft the white fleece shrouds
   Field, hill and wall;
And now I know
   Why comes the snow:
The bare black places lie
   Too near the sky.





2024-01-18

 


Snow
--Frederick Seidel

Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.





2024-01-17


[ And I Saw an Angel Come Down from Heaven, Having the Key of the Bottomless Pit and a Great Chain in His Hand; Odilon Redon (1899) ]


2024-01-15

 
--Stéphane Mallarmé

I bring you the child of an Idumean night!
Black, with pale naked bleeding wings, Light
Through the glass, burnished with gold and spice,
Through panes, still dismal, alas, and cold as ice,
Hurled itself, daybreak, against the angelic lamp.
Palm-leaves! And when it showed this relic, damp,
To that father attempting an inimical smile,
The solitude shuddered, azure, sterile.
O lullaby, with your daughter, and the innocence
Of your cold feet, greet a terrible new being:
A voice where harpsichords and viols linger,
Will you press that breast, with your withered finger,
From which Woman flows in Sibylline whiteness to
Those lips starved by the air’s virgin blue?