05.31.06
from _Paterson_
a roar of books
from the wadded library oppresses him
until
his mind begins to drift .
Beautiful thing:
–a dark flame,
a wind, a flood–counter to all staleness.
From William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Book Three
05.24.06
in transit
Flashes of half-remembered
people pop up sporadically,
this is known and nothing
to be done. Forgive the naivete,
not knowing the procedure here,
struck still by the glancing blows
of what has yet to be worked out.
The inexpressible works itself
out in the daily rearing
of livestock. The plucking
of boiled feathers off
carcass. Left in tobacco
fields, in drying barns
where children risked
themselves playfully.
Porpoise tendency
submerging, the vessel
shakes in anticipation.
Wearing these travel pants
stained with itineraries, I wake up
and realize that stages of descent
are infinite, taking into account
headwind and ground speed,
guesses of voicestreams.
Widespread glances at
the nexus of transit to
somewhere else–the shape
of home. The flashes of light
too irregular to be a beacon,
the rationale of a storm.
05.22.06
from Robert Strong’s “Selah”
One problem is thinking continually
with the mouth. Is the thought
of small muscles lipping across milk teeth.
The earliest mouths
make not such labor, exactly.
There is no effort, just babes’ well-greased
easy and irritating condemnation.
The trance and deep terrifying thirst
make as a moth
continuously flaming in the mouth.
The word is made in a heart
to just stay there, ok?
From Robert Strong's poem, "Selah" in the Puritan Spectacle, available soon from Elixir Press.
05.18.06
downtown fort
The sad cornices of granite
Clucking laboriously down
From tombstone heights
Fashioned by emperors
To honor endless trails
Of paper, monuments
To the great frozen
Bureaucracy, licked by
Roman flourishes the kiss
Before the fall. Down these
Avenues of long containers,
Scratch to revitalize, to stimulate
Scalp and elicit flakes, dermatology
On one’s shoulder. Shoulders
Upon shoulders, billboard
Weaknesses. Turn the corner,
Turn the collar up, the eyes down,
Emptier stores, improvised offices
Where one’s tardiness is another
Pointless click away.
05.16.06
Stevens, from “Description Without Place”
Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.
It is an artificial thing that exists,
In its own seeming, plainly visible,
Yet not too closely the double of our lives,
Intenser than any actual life could be,
A text we should be born that we might read,
More explicit than the experience of sun
And moon, the book of reconciliation,
Book of a concept only possible
In description, canon central in itself,
The thesis of the plentifullest John.
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, from "Description Without Place"
05.13.06
gorgeous evasions
tune in
so hard
to true
the frequency
no need to
resort to
words
lack the stature
my enemy
may I borrow
your discourse
so hard
the hatred
in the face of
fallacy
of the absolute
my weakness
so hard
the precedent
to raise
or co-opt
from context
be robbed
in this
summitless
city
crumbling
patriot
act
not on
but in
your terms
my enemy
you have
injured me
witlessly
so let us
resound
05.12.06
The Mast-Head
"…but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and ever strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over."
From Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, "The Mast-Head"
Doesn't the last sentence also make one think of the way the internet diffuses one spirit through time and space? I love this book, this quote.
about this blog
I have been a silent observer of blogs for the last year, and I mainly read the blogs that are listed in the blogosphere on the right. I've only met a few of the fellow bloggers, and I have not really engaged in any of their conversations. Not from lack of interest…I really don't know why. I guess I ultimately like to read, observe, and reflect on ideas.
This blog will be dedicated to ideas, but it makes no promises beyond that. The blog will be a sort of commonplace book to collect ideas that interest me, and my own oblique responses to those ideas. If you have somehow stumbled upon my blog, welcome. I'd love to hear from you.
05.11.06
planned obsolescence
the effort of the house
to withstand
pressures of seconds
wonder
how the dead
become our homes
tents in itinerant
landscape
From Foucault
"There is an optimism that consists in saying, 'in any case, it couldn't be any better.' My optimisim would consist rather in saying, 'So many things can be changed, being as fragile as they are, tied to more contingencies than to necessities, more to what is arbitrary than to what is rationally established, more to complex but transitory historical contingencies than to inevitable anthropological constants…' You know, to way that we are more recent than we thought is not a way of bringing the whole weight of our history down on our shoulders. Rather, it is to make available for the work taht we can do on ourselves the largest possible share of what is presented to us as inaccessible."
–From "So Is It Important to Think?", The Essential Foucault, Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose
