“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”
– John Keats, Hyperion.
“But you offer, saturnine traveler,
with what eloquence in mute space
consolation to him whose life is broken”
-Luis Carlos López, Versos a la luna
“… did not need much
To make us laugh instead, and touch,”
-A.E. Stallings, “Recitative,” from Poetry (April 2005).
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
-A. E. Stallings, “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther” from Poetry, April 2005.
Tar babies are
not the children
of tar people.
It is far worse.
The tar baby occurs
spontaneously
nor do we adhere
at first. There is
an especially
unperverse
attractiveness
to the tar baby–
although currently
she is a little sick.
When you start
to help her
is when she
start to stick.
Kay Ryan, “Tar Babies“
“In this place every true thing is okay.
[…]
They drove off into a violet so ultra it broke her heart.”
-(TM)
“This was a place with a very different material and mythological past and present.
[…]
The notion of a more-than-human world further intimates that these things are beings: not passive props in the drama of our own preoccupations, but active participants in our collective becoming.
[…]
Art has a role to play here”
-(JB)
“Of course”
Glass: Four Movements for Two Pianos – IV. — · Katia & Marielle Labèque. 2013 KML Recordings Released on: 2016-09-16 Composer: Philip Glass
“the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian” (SH)
“Being itself is relational. […] Our human agency and intentionality transforms the objects of culture into subjects, through the meaning we give to them and the uses we put them to.
[…]
care : a constant attentiveness to the meaning and affect of our entanglement.
[…]
politics : the hard, meaty detail of debate, decision-making, power relationships and status.”
-James Bridle, Ways of Being
“We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.”
–VI—The Stare’s Nest By My Window, W. B. Yeats.
Bernardo Arévalo, from the progressive Movimiento Semilla party, won Guatemala’s presidential election. (theguardian)
‘It’s the principle involved–
Truth, Beauty,
Call what you will,
Belittle it …’ Traveling light,
Your lifework, inch-high sculpture
Crammed in a matchbox
Weighs nothing, in the scale of things.
—Matchbox Sculptures by Harry Clifton
Rein by Gustavo Santaolalla for the film, Biutiful, 2010.
It is a good day when I see you,
powder-red bloom
on a floating branch.
Or hear you, sliding your one note
barbershop style.
You are always a distance
from me–I try
to get close.
When the sun has hardly risen,
I step quietly
through the woods,
find your shape. Say
to myself: hide,
desire. Yours are not the kind
of hands
to catch this kind of bird.
– Bird in the Head by Ailish Hopper