December 2008
43 posts
Thus Spoke Allen G. on the state of TIME Magazine...
America -
I’m addressing you. Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious....
Thus Spoke TIME Magazine on the state of poetry in... →
“Poetry is not, unfortunately, what most poets are writing in English today. In the last 20 years, the English-speaking world has produced no major poet and scarcely a score of those minor bards who assiduously tune the lyre of language till another great man is ready to take it up. But if quality is lacking, quantity is not.”
[—-]
“The Beats. The Group’s bloody...
Al Purdy: The Last Picture in the World →
A hunched grey shape framed by leaves with lake water behind standing on our little point of land like a small monk in a green monastery meditating
almost sculpture except that it’s alive brooding immobile permanent for half an hour a blue heron and it occurs to me that if I were to die at this moment that picture would accompany me wherever I am going for part of the way
~~~
From: Beyond...
Letter from Snyder in Japan to Ginsberg →
“Listen man if you feel up to it will you write me a concise statement of your theory of beatness and its relation to vision, poetry, and America? and to sex? I’m seeing new angles to this rough Zen-discipline shot; perhaps by reducing one’s life to essentials of eating (barely enough) and sleeping (barely enough) and working (hard) …. making you thoroughly beat and aware...
Guy Davenport on Brautigan in the Hudson Review
“Mr. Brautigan locates his writing on the barricade which the sane mind maintains against spiel and bilge, and here he cavorts with a divine idiocy, thumbing his nose. But he makes clear that at his immediate disposal is a fund of common sense he does not hesitate to bring into play. He is a kind of Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face.”
Richard Brautigan - December 30
At 1:03 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.
.
I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on.
.
- from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Copyright © 1968
Ebbe Borregaard - Bolinas and North Beach poet →
MY BOLINAS
I am all that aspirations will contend you, young of the east westward wending It is for you I have been loved over & over In alien temples, in homefields, where I was a rover
We have waited since the first celestial dawn yr lovelyness to meet, the power of our Loving as the principle law this univers abides We luckt in its size & within us it is hiding
And I have waited out...
Robin Blaser interview (by John Sakkis)
JS: The role of philosophy, particularly Giorgio Agamben, in your recent work seems to share a mutual if not equal playing field with poetry. How do you qualify these two disciplines in your work (poetry, essay, or otherwise)?
RB: Poetry and philosophy are hand in hand. Philosophy, that language which searches for the syntax of the abstract and so on, bursts out of the ancient world […] I...
Robin Blaser - Untitled →
sea and sky desiring the boat with its vibrant pink sail on English Bay calls each of us to sail those passionate adventures out there desiring, I know it’s the white desire of the clouds drifting when the moon rushes into the game and drill of actual language loving it out there, the particular peril as desire trusts
James Schuyler: Dec. 28, 1974 →
The plants against the light which shines in (it’s four o’clock) right on my chair: I’m in my chair: are silhouettes, barely green, growing black as my eyes move right, right to where the sun is. I am blinded by a fiery circle: I can’t see what I write. A man comes down iron stairs (I don’t look up) and picks up brushes which, against a sonata of Scriabin’s,...
Charles Olson Paris Review Interview
Gerry Malanga:
Why have you chosen poetry as a medium of artistic creation?
Olson:
I think I made a hell of a mistake. That’s the first confidence I have. The other is that - I didn’t really have anything else to do. I mean I didn’t even have enough imagination to think of something else. I was supposed to go to Holy Cross because I wanted to play baseball. I did, too....
December 26 - Kenn Nesbitt →
A BB gun.
A model plane.
A basketball.
A ’lectric train.
A bicycle.
A cowboy hat.
A comic book.
A baseball bat.
A deck of cards.
A science kit.
A racing car.
A catcher’s mitt.
So that’s my list
of everything
that Santa Claus
forgot to bring.
Death May Be Ageing - Harold Pinter →
Death may be ageing But he still has clout But death disarms you With his limpid light And he’s so crafty That you don’t know at all Where he awaits you To seduce your will And to strip you naked As you dress to kill But death permits you To arrange your hours While he sucks the honey From your lovely flowers Harold Pinter April 2005
A Dream of Suffocation - Robert Bly
Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters, Dropping bits of paper engraved with Hegel’s name. Badgers carry the papers on their fur To their den, where the entire family dies in the night.
A chorus girl stands for hours behind her curtains Looking out at the street. In a window of a trucking service There is a branch painted white. A stuffed baby alligator grips that branch tightly...
Kenneth Rexroth - Yin and Yang
It is spring once more in the Coast Range Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon. The flowers are back in their places. The birds are back in their usual trees. The winter stars set in the ocean. The summer stars rise from the mountains. The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver. Resurrection envelops the earth. Goemetrical, blazing, deathless, Animals and men march through heaven, Pacing their...
This one goes out to all you Modernists and other...
Jack Kerouac - Credo from San Francisco Blues
In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these...
What Do You Do? from MANIAC MEMORIES by JIM... →
What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play the blues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers. I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin. I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja...
September 1961 - Denise Levertov
This is the year the old ones, the old great ones leave us alone on the road. The road leads to the sea. We have the words in our pockets, obscure directions. The old ones have taken away the light of their presence, we see it moving away over a hill off to one side. They are not dying, they are withdrawn into a painful privacy learning to live without words. E. P. “It looks like...
Nicholas Born - Before Falling Asleep →
Under the covers three a.m. I want to be off to the BETTER WORLD this is the wall I have to go into to close off my face and put the world behind me in my own personal past The curtain’s blowing it’s September— how silly these facts are like...
Sampson Starkweather from A LIMITATION OF BIRDS... →
5 Randy Johnson, the future Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees, refuses, to this day, to talk about the seagull he hit in Seattle with a 96 mph fastball in a spring training game in 1994. The wayward seagull exploded in mid-air, its body thudding in the grass as a flurry of white feathers held above the plate in a cloud. Johnson looked as if he wanted to go over to the bird, the way you’d go to...
Muriel Rukeyser - The Road
These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,
.
reading the papers with morning inquiry.
Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light
chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights
.
indicate future or road, your wish pursuing
past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,
well-travelled...
Jack Spicer: Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
Via Al...
Gertrude Stein - Portrait of Picasso
One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming.
Some were certainly following and were certain that the one they were then following was one working and was one...
e.e. cummings
Picasso you give us Things which bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind you make us shrill presents always shut in the sumptuous screech of simplicity (out of the black unbunged Something gushes vaguely a squeak of planes or between squeals of Nothing grabbed with circular shrieking tightness solid screams whisper.) Lumberman of The Distinct your brain’s axe only chops hugest...
Emily D. --- 1773
The Summer that we did not prize, Her treasures were so easy Instructs us by departing now And recognition lazy — Bestirs itself — puts on its Coat, And scans with fatal promptness For Trains that moment out of sight, Unconscious of his smartness.
America, America! - Delmore Schwartz
I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it, the lights, the stars, and the bridges I am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic -of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it to new America. I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope, acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage in...
BLUES POEM - Jack Micheline →
I got no smile cause I’m down
I carry a horn to blow in all these streets
A solo riff out of my head
How could you ever know I feel
So high on life and feet and ass and legs and thighs
That I can rise and dance with all the stars
And I can eat the moon and laugh and I can cry
The dark caves of cities hungry streets
The tired faces dark and dreary bent
and all the death it dies
I let it die
I...
Barry Gifford - Monk's Funeral →
Snowy February day in New York 1982 I read in newspaper Thelonious Monk’s funeral open to public I trudged crosstown through drifts to get there Saint Peter’s church Lexington & 54th woman handed me program at the door went in sat down on bleacher seat 3/4 round auditorium with windows so people outside pressed against glass looked in...
Space by Greg Williamson →
Space dons Time’s Delta pin. First date. Sparks fly. There’s chemistry, there’s calculus, there’s luck. And then (and there) there’s us, the loinsome fry Of good old Father Time and Mother Fuck,
Their spacey, new-age offspring, have her face, His hands, cut from the same cloth, their heirloom. We’re graviton, Calabi-Yau. We’re Space And Time’s. We’re leg-, head-, elbow-, living room,
Until one...
THE EVERYDAY by John Latta →
57
Sunday at Costco a trio Of off-work Mexican roofers Hog the CD listening head- Phones, rotating a paltry number Of norteña throwaways out of The international bin. Undocument’d workers Leisure in America. Or night Comes down like a sledge Hammer, and a slew of Bach violin concertos is being Play’d in a hall miles Away with a gamut of Baroque instruments accompanying. One notes The...
MARTY MATZ - Time Waits →
TIME WAITS A SOMETIMES MOSSY LINE BETWEEN NOVEMBER AND THE SEA TIME WAITS FOR ME ALONE TURNING SLOWLY FROM SOUND OF BASS AND NEON SOLITUDE TO THE TWO O’CLOCK ACHE OF WARM GREEN ON THE MOUNTAIN TIME WAITS AND SOMEWHERE OUT BEYOND THE MEXICO CITY BLUES TWO BIRD-LIKE HEARTS BEAT THEIR WAY FROM DREAM TO DREAM ...
