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| images to auto |
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| heading to buckeye / up before the sun |
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| luck dragon my saguaro |
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
from poetry daily - poems.com
Blackbody Curve
Stairs: a rushed flight down thirty-eight; French doors unlocked always.
Always: a lie; an argument.
Argument: two buck hunters circle a meadow’s edge.
Edge: one of us outside bleeding.
Bleeding: shards of glass; doors locked.
Locked: carpet awash with blood.
Blood: lift and drop; a sudden breeze.
Breeze: its whistle through bone.
Bone: the other was looking at —
Bone: cradled to catch drips.
Drips: quiet as a meadow fawn.
Fawn: faces down each hunter each gun.
Gun: again.
Again: somebody call someone.
Someone: almost always prefers forgetting.
Forgetting: an argument; a lie.
Lie: a meadow; a casement; a stair.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Monday, January 25, 2016
(wishing for) my best impression / of my best angie dickinson
I like this. Entropy Mag does a good 20th ann. tribute for Tori, for Pele:
http://entropymag.org/you-make-me-feel-12-boys-for-pele-20th-anniversary/
http://entropymag.org/you-make-me-feel-12-boys-for-pele-20th-anniversary/
20 years pele / i don't like a thing anyone is saying in honor of 1996-2016 / it's not enough / no other artist has had such an impact on my thinking / this album is seminal
“An emotional work like [“Boys for Pele”] is inspired from an emotional place; it’s about stealing fire from the men in my life,” she told the New York Post in 1996. “I guess I didn’t realize how much confidence I have in certain areas of my life, and just so little in other areas. It seemed as though everywhere I turned was to male mentors or emotional involvements. I became a vampire needing to feed, needing their energy and I didn’t know how to access it. When I was onstage I could, but when I walked off that stage I began to see that the woman was completely divided and segregated from the work.”
Tommy Shelby: Will you help me?
Grace Burgess: Help you with what?
Tommy Shelby: With everything. The whole fucking thing. Fucking life, business. I found you. And you found me. We'll help each other.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
god is louise. louise moves in mysterious ways.
C.D.WrightDeepstep Come Shining (excerpt) |
Meanwhile the cars continued in a persistent flow down Closeburn Road.
The refrain to the rain would be a movement up and down the clefs of light. Chlorophyll world. July. Great goblets of magnolia light. Her head cooling against the car glass. The mind apprehends the white piano, her mother. Who played only what she chose, who chose only to play “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” A stadium emptied. The ruby progression of tail lights. The eyes’ ability to perceive a series of still images as continuous motion. Time lapse. This wasn’t movie traffic. There weren’t twenty people to see Smoke. At the drive-in. When they were young. The parents were young. The children falling asleep on the hood with the motor warm. Coating the ornamental swan with their prints. The projectionist’s private life: shadows animating a wall. “Never avert your eyes.” (Kurosawa) A photograph is a writing of the light. Photo Graphein. More than magnolia, crepe myrtle is missed. The white bushes especially. Against undifferentiated dark. It is unlike night. She will still be up when we come in. Our floating host. She will be at the door in her pleated nightgown. Admit us into her air- conditioned nightgown. Her glory cloud. |
In the seclusionary cool of the car the mind furnishes a high-ceilinged room with a white piano. Seldom struck. Color sensations. In which the piano floats on a black marble lake, mute swan in a dark room. Beyond the windshield the land claims saturate levels of green. Illuminating figures and objects. Astonishing our earthliness. I was there. I know.
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Everyone in their car needs love. Car love. Meat love. Money love. Pass with care.
Deepstep, Baby. Deepstep. The boneman said he would take the blinded to the river. With a mirror. And then what. The boneman said he would take the blinded into a darkened room. And put a hot-herb poultice on their sightless face. Mullein for this mullein for that. We called it flannel. Then leave them there. The baby sister of the color photographer had a baby girl in the hills. Born with scooped-out sockets in the head. Born near the tracks they sprayed with Agent Orange. The railroad’s denials, ditto the army’s. They would have been blue. The eyes. She did not have. Blue as the chicory in yonder ditch. |
We see a little farther now and a little farther still
She said her lights would be on and they were Groping around the sleeping house in our gowns Peeping into the unseen Beautiful things fill every vacancy |
Ripcord Lounge is up on the right. 32° beer. A little past the package store. Suddenly I have the feeling of a great victory. A delirious brilliance.
All around in here it used to be so pretty. The boneman’s bobcat. Its untamable eyes in the night. Did you know a ghost has hair. A ghost has hair. That’s right. Peaches and fireworks and red ants. Now do you know where you are. I boarded with a suitcase of Blackboard fireworks. I had forgotten about the Unabomber. They shook me down. Confiscated my sparklers, my Roman candles, my ladyfingers. Make a left just beyond Pulltight Road. The land obtained in exchange for two blind horses. This land became known as Wrens. |
Merely listening
After the rain the trees smell so pleased The hale sleep naked atop the sheets We leave the deck for the lawn The grasses licking our feet A semicircle of chairs opens a parenthesis In the direction of the light source We see a little farther now and a little farther still Peeping into the unseen |
Why is she so kind. Our floating host. Why am I so stingy and vain.
A baseball diamond in every hamlet. The waitresses in hairnets. Nurse-caps. Employees must pluck out an eye before returning to work. Cold eyes are bad to eat. You lied. She doesn’t have air-conditioning. She is long in bed. Note on the fridge: Vanilla yogurt inside. See you in the morning, girls. How did you like Smoke. No one should know the hour or the day. We will become godlike. Open the window. That the glory cloud may come and go. Inside the iris of time, the iridescent dreaming kicks in. Turn off that stupid damn machine. Kepler’s invention of the camera lucidafell into oblivion some two hundred years. There is no avoiding oblivion. Where does this damn stupid thing go. For god’s sake. Are you sure you want to wear that. Especially in this one-stoplight town. Watch out for “the swerve of small town eyes.” (Agee) Feel them trained on you in unison. Boiled peanuts. Now that is an acquired taste. Once the eye is enucleated. Would you replace it with wood, ivory, bone, shell, or a precious stone. Who invented the glass eye. Guess. The Venetians. Of course. Go to Venice; bring me back a mason jar of glass eyes. They shall multiply like shadflies. |
The antinomian marsupial in the road fixing us in her eyeshine,tapeta lucida. The objective is hopeless — abandon the baseball diamond for the strip mall. Nothing arboreal to correct the view. The Dumpster behind Long John Silver’s berths the opossum in its postnuptial fast-food armor. Slower now, go slow. SPEED HECKED BY RADAR. O lucky stars. Motel 6 left its light on for us. Remember you are nothing without credit.
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In Rome (likewise-built-on-seven-hills), Georgia, the citizens hail their fellows as Romans. We never found the Forum. The arrows continued pointing right. And a sculpture of Remus and Romulus. Given by Il Duce to the Romans of Georgia. Stored in a root cellar during the war.
It follows that in Athens, Georgia, the citizens hail their fellows as Athenians. West of Rome is Poetry. Poetry, Georgia. Wonder who lives there. In the antique store, voices emanating from the pots. How I miss the white piano. Only in the fovea. Where the photoreceptors are so concentrated. Maximal sight. Keep me in your arc of acuity. Siempre, por favor. Maybe you should turn the air conditioner off. We’re not moving. The rain gives but brief relief. I’d take the boneman over the snakeman, but when the snakeman talked about walking his six-point stag home through the pecan orchard, I felt a twinge of envy for the gentle living that can go on in the country. And when I peer inside the cage the boneman keeps the bobcat in, I feel a twinge of ill will toward his ignorance. Deepstep. People just know what they know. (Come shining.) The chicken’s name is Becky. They found her a good home with a peahen for fellowship. Chicken love. Don’t park in the shade on my account. If we let the windows down we can hear Cape Fear. Exhaust stink. Or is that Hog Waste Lagoon. Man alive, that’s foul. Get your bearings. Hear the trees. The silver threads of Spanish moss dripping from the telephone wires. It flies here. In pianolight. Like ghost hair. |
Friday, January 15, 2016
rip cd wright / will so miss your words, are so blessed and grateful for what we do have / thank you
Postscript: C. D. Wright, 1949-2016
BY BEN LERNER
I first saw C. D. Wright when I was a seventeen-year-old high-school senior enrolled in a pre-college writing program at Brown University. It took about five minutes of her reading in her distinctly Arkansan accent from her most recent book—I believe it was “Tremble”—before I realized I was in the presence of an utterly original American artist. When I returned to Brown as a freshman that fall, I followed her around, weaseled my way into her classes, and tried to figure out the source of her cool and how to siphon something from it. I never really figured it out. None of us has ever really figured it out. You can’t imitate unaffectedness and unpretentiousness and such peculiar brilliance in the classroom or on the page. But you know it when you see it, hear it.
Academics and reviewers and prize committees and various admirers have tried to pin C. D. down, typically with praise: a Southern poet “of place” (she probably hated that) or an erotic poet or a vanguard innovator or an elliptical or documentarian poet, etc. Such descriptions are both briefly true and ultimately insufficient, because she was one of the most formally restless and ambitious writers in the language. Even categorizing her as uncategorizable is too easy: she was part of a line of mavericks and contrarians who struggled to keep the language particular in times of ever-encroaching standardization. I think of the messy genius of James Agee and Mary Austin as two possible antecedents for her genre-bending, lyrically charged, often outraged and outrageous American English.
Across her career she wrote stunning discrete poems, but starting with the volume “Just Whistle,” from 1993, she began exploring and extending the possibilities of the book as a specific medium—as a physical object encountered in time, as an environment. C. D. could write gorgeous lines and sentences and short lyrics (and titles, e.g. “Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues”) but she was also uniquely capable of scaling up her attention to the larger architecture of the book as a form. Volumes like “Deepstep Come Shining,” “Cooling Time,” “One Big Self” (one of her many collaborations with the photographer Deborah Luster), and “One with Others” braid research, reminiscence, and reportage with ode and elegy. Like many experimental poets, she wanted to test the limits of narrative, of reference. But C. D. never apologized for having or being a subject. She never fled into procedure; technique was in the service of the sharable, the felt. And her books, while never not political, were increasingly so. “I believe,” she wrote in a piece called “Op Ed,”
in a hardheaded art, an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms. I believe the word was made good from the start; it remains so to this second. I believe words are golden as goodness is golden. Even the humble word brush gives off a scratch of light. There is not much poetry from which I feel barred, whether it is arcane or open in the extreme. I attempt to run the gamut because I am pulled by the extremes. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world. I hold to hard distinctions of right and wrong.
She had no illusions about what poetry could do in the face of “the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.” But she had no patience for disillusion, for those who would surrender their wonder before the world. (“Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”)
Carolyn D. Wright was born in the Ozarks, in 1949, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. From “hills: an autobiographical preface”:
My first words—I’ve been told—were obscene. My highchair was handed-down and painted over white. I remember the hard heels of my white shoes chipping at the paint of the rung. Brought up in a large unaestheticized house littered with Congressional Records and stenotype paper by a Chancery Judge and The Court’s hazel-eyed Reporter who took down his every word which was law. Throughout my childhood I was knife-sharp and aquatic in sunlight. I read.
After attending college in Arkansas, she spent time in New York and San Francisco, where she met the poet Forrest Gander; they moved to Providence in 1983. Together they ran the small, legendary Lost Roads Press and raised their son, Brecht. She passed away yesterday morning.
And now I’m sitting here surrounded by her books—a new volume came out this month—with the distinct feeling that I would need to possess C. D.’s mixture of precision and pathos and dark humor in order to begin describing what we’ve lost. She was to me and so many poets an exemplary and inimitable figure. And I mean to emphasize the tension between “exemplary” and “inimitable”—what her example taught us was the necessity of going our own way, of being one with others.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
You don’t show your hands
You keep your hands to
yourself. Everything got grit and oh the
cloudline cold mornings, this new year of keep yourself hold tight or a shotgun. You went thin gait down the streetline I should’ve
held you every second I had instead of neighbor, coworker, for you were a boy
and this world needs boys, whether slinging weed at the stop sign or bringing
me bottles weekend nights, my god we have gotten this town so drunk who knows,
tony, you sweet thing the police have shut our whole block down and are bullhorn
calling out your name for two hours now, nothing to do but say yo t, can I pop
over nbd I am here. Who will down 12th
St gait a boy any longer. I should
have run out to you every time you hitch gaited past my window instead of all
this, t, we are all alone, yes, t, you were too precious, t, yes this outfit is
stupid and I am not myself biking off to be teacher, no this ain’t it either behind
this bar, yet there is earth somewhere a boy throws marbles, boys in trees,
there are boys alone the wind hugs in the trees, there is the wind through the
door crack hugging you to your next life, there is the shotgun, t, there is all
us wishing this shotgun would hold you instead the police busting in and all us
with our weird hands and the wind down 12th St and this earth now.
Monday, January 11, 2016
2016
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| 2016 let's work it out! |
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| pea luck? pea luck. |
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| master of pea luck. |
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| yes packers yes! come alive again! |
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| big o sugarbear |
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| there is stingray, there is arson |
regretfully late post of georgia xmas and tucs goodstuff
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| we be eatin |
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| sophia so-so-so-so-sophia |
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| 13 years old |
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| mama and us girls' cottage |
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| mama and daddy's |
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| granny's |
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| granny likes them cookie jars |
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| sweetest mamacita |
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| daddy |
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| overly blessed |
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| sweetest gift from ralph |
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| nesting lashels |
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| riding my pony on the last day of the year |
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