October 2009
10 posts
Bruce Cawin interviews John Ashbery, who... →
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 7 (The Lid)
This technique is for a hole in the world.
It’ll kick us off fine as long as I flip my light light lid.
Lid on my head is face; ask someone strong to open it for you.
My heart is jam for your sammiches. Let’s go, as long as I let go.
Stick my hands under your suspenders and play telefone with your nipples.
The signal turns from my sticky, grubby nuts-stinking fingers,
Around the circle of...
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 6 (Twin Billions)
Close all the windows, nail them closed.
Friendly, though we be, we can kill on command.
Though we be friendly, we can kill the commander at the drop of a hat.
We can drop the commander off at daycare.
Wrapped in black taffeta (to temporarily blind us with our warm reflections)
The baby man is fevered beyond a popular grove,
To where a clearing comes to rest his bones.
There we are gathered...
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 5
Five minutes behind the final day,
You see, of a new silo opening its roof,
The now-blind guests baled in hay on the first floor
Meet their maker, in the market.
We loosen the leashed Dogs, they are small
And fetid after tea with the Pigs,
And O the wrenches we have to toss
To get them off our legs.
For their humping is another, purer song,
Which if we listened would seem not unlike
...
"Watering Hole" part 4
Tearing up the atmosphere, laying low in the endpoint place,
We watch if and only if it comes to rest here,
If and only if the size is light enough to heft.
We worry, together and openly, what if the weather breaks?
Outside, albino berries grow from the back of a rooted tree.
Six fine crevices work down its wide sides,
Where we put our fingers to grip the lame being, mutely free,
From its...
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 3
I wake and my bound mind is a vegetable. On its own: cold.
Later at mass, otherwise, but like a sun-dried skull in a buzzard’s belly,
It shivers under its warm coat of mold,
Even as we conspire in our prayers the prospect of cooking it anyway.
The possibility that it can’t make it through to spring
Without some new knife skinning it of its hide
Is hard to bear, even for a seedpod drying and...
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 2
That sounds about right, how I felt you vindicated.
Which one is that? A fox.
I had written it down again, written down the line to put me in last place.
No more do I get to try. No more will I try.
Not like I caught it from you, womb cauldron.
Fun to cross that off the cross.
Thanks a lot, says womb cauldron, sarcastically.
Piping in hot sounds of love to the unadorned,
By a warm pool on...
1 tag
"Watering Hole" part 1
An old long poem by N. Rosquist
Then, my grandfather says in a soft, kind voice,
Odd genitals marked the surface of the earth,
A piping hot mucus plain. I had sucked out
My own brother’s vocal cords, and wiped them dry with a dry towelette.
Today, in this year, we break the neck of sound before we wipe wipe wipe.
A cage door flaps open and closed, again, but the buzz horn always fades.
...
“What is more important is that we recognize that it is possible to create...”
– http://life.ou.edu/pubs/zen/node2.html
Signal diffusion
Something about:
The light of every being at once everywhere.
It’s not that the signal dies out. It’s that Pockets of difference arise & the noise absorbs and adapts to it (the signal)
September 2009
3 posts
Something about smoke
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” - Hamlet
“sin is the refusal to become conscious”
– Jungface
August 2009
3 posts
dreamt: horizontal ladder of spider webs
dreamt: ben h was dying… wondered whether I should hang around him.
China: clamboring over tiled roofs, then up mountain hills, sparking off delightful nuclear bombs with thoughts………
February 2009
1 post
A fail willow branch
A fail willow branch
White on amber ground
I picked up and took
As a bit, for ye godz
To direct me.
But wherez the sun in that.
The willow pulls me off
Like basketwork. I file
For a line, wicker-brittle
And see my god in the
Back of the man in front’s
Head, as we faithfully march
In an endless circle.
Here in my room, sun streaming
Through an open door, my
White face blue...
January 2009
22 posts
up by 8:30, power out. considered plucking the last twenty or so lemons off the tree just out my door. yoga lite, alarm battery died ca 40 minutes into meditation, so it turned into an hour and a half.
“The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure”
info as porn.
Veridian manifesto:
We can increase our chances of success by rapidly developing and expanding...
Symposium [220c]
Alcibiades, in Plato’s Symposium:
So much for that: but next, the valiant deed our strong-souled hero dared(homer) on service there one day, is well worth hearing. Immersed in some problem at dawn, he stood in the same spot considering it; and when he found it a tough one, he would not give it up but stood there trying. The time drew on to midday, and the men began to notice him,...
Dalai Lama homophobic? →
“Although he is known for his tolerant, humane views, he is a surprisingly harsh critic of homosexuality. If you are a Buddhist, he says, it is wrong. ‘Full stop.’”
Why people like Sagmeister
“the ability to make you see things in a new way
remind you of your youth
show passion and commitment
unexpectedness
virtuosity of craft or technique (unbelievability that someone is so good at somethign)
beauty (or what i see as beauty)
copied from an old notebook, words from designer Sagmeister on what makes good design, aka things that touch the heart/mind vs. touch the ego
“This itself is the whole of the journey, opening your heart to that which is...”
– nikaya
“I think people have the idea that, if only they could get away from the hustle...”
– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, “The Myth of Freedom”
Clusterfuck Three: Manure
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, from the myth of freedom
“Meditation is a way of churning out the neurosies of mind and using them as part of practice. Like manure, we don’t throw our neuroses away, but we spread them on our garden; they become part of our richness.”
His book, Meditation in Action
“It is said , I think in the Lankavatara Sutra, that unskilled farmers throw away their...
“the purpose of philosophy to redefine the important questions”
– zizek (via thisrecording, probably a paraphrase)
Clusterfuck two
Speculative Anxiety
“Here the difference between the known (following into the category horror) and the unknown (falling into the category of terror) crosses the sensible and the speculative.” “Lovecraft appreciates the lengths to which clusters of atoms (objects as purely material things) can be formed into horrifically incomprehensible shapes but the power of thought in Lovecraft is thought to...
"My soul’s windshield wiper"
iff Laura Riding (+ Auden + Stevens) ≤ JAshbery
Rowland quoting Ashbery, making a deontic case for Margaret’s Pepper Principle:
This could almost stand as an epigraph to Ashbery’s work, epitomizing his improvisational practice, grounded in “not-understanding”—a selflessness or humility of sorts. As he himself has stated:
I think every poem before it’s written is...
Clusterfuck
“it seems that LS’s point is this: the Ontic principle (“there is no difference that does not make a difference”) does not intend to describes Kantian Things-in-themselves (which would simply be a return to traditional metaphysics), but seeks to overcome the nature/culture divide that characterizes Modernist thinking by asserting (1) the horizontal nature of difference and (2) the...
“a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”
– William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Harman's +3
“Get something on paper immediately…”
“Write first, edit later.”
“’Always delete your first paragraph– especially if you’re proud of it’…”
Supplementary Advice
Antistory 2
Wrote this about a year ago, months before I actually met Phoebe:
Once there were Felix and Phoebe.
Or, there was Felix, and there was Phoebe, both mothlike on fire in life and in death.
There was their daughter Metaxu, and over there lay their son Taxonomy, and there their doggy Texaco. Here lie their twin sons Phone and Phobe, homos both.
On the homo Phone’s stone is etched a heart, which...
“dip him in the river who loves the water”
– William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Daily Routines →
Basil Bunting's 7
“I SUGGEST…
Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
Use spoken words and syntax.
Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape. Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
Cut out every word you dare.
Do it again a week later, and again.
Never explain -...
Kenneth Koch offers advice for young writers,... →
A Kenneth Koch lecture at the Naropa Institute. Koch offers advice for young writers—digressing frequently to speak of his experience writing, teaching, and reading, as well as his friendships with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.
“Be simple, Ezra, be simple!
— Djuna Barnes to Ezra Pound”
– Advice To Young Poets // quotations // collected by Mark Worden
“Poetry must be as well written as prose.
— Ezra Pound letter to H. Munroe”
– Advice To Young Poets // quotations // collected by Mark Worden
Wilkinson's 5
“Write everyday…”
“Learn poems you love…”
“Cultivate silence…”
“Embrace revision…”
“Practice gratitude…”
Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry
6 tags
Harman's 5*
“Seek models…”
“Try to hang out with productive people…”
“Even more practically speaking…Write from an outline…”
“If possible, you should also write in genres that are not the most important to you…”
“Once you’re past the potential catastrophe stage of life, it can also be good to fall by dumb luck into a high...