The blackbird sings at
the frontier of his music.
The branch where he sat
marks the brink of doubt,
is the outpost of his realm,
edge from which to rout
encroachers with trills
and melismatic runs sur-
passing earthbound skills.
It sounds like ardor,
it sounds like joy. We are glad
here at the border
where he signs the air
with his invisible staves,
“Trespassers beware”—
Song as survival—
a kind of pure music which
we cannot rival.
Blackbird Etude, A.E. Stallings
In the avoidance of that which we seek––
The sudden silence and reserve when near––
The eye that glistens with an unshed tear––
The joy that seems the counterpart of fear,
As the alarmed heart leaps in the breast,
And knows, and names, and greets its godlike guest––
Thus doth Love speak.
[…]
Glance strikes with glance, swift flashing high and higher,
Like lightnings that precede the mighty storm;
In the deep soulful stillness; in the warm,
Impassioned tide that sweeps through throbbing veins,
Between the shores of keen delights and pains;
Love’s Language, Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The LRB Podcast, Poetry and the Turning World: Weather. Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar discusses wind, clouds, hurricanes via poems.
“The weather app is no oracle.” Maureen N. McLane
How do you represent the divine and the central miracles of Christianity? Divine Presence explores this question through the captivating world of marble representations in Late Gothic and Early Renaissance art. (Hatje Cantz Verlag)
A detail of Julie Mehretu’s site-specific diptych, OWL, eon (I, II), 2017. SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium.
“GG [Gary Garrels]: In 2008 we approached Kerry James Marshall about making new works for those walls. I had done a show here with Kerry James in the 1990s, so we already had a wonderful relationship of long standing. He decided he wanted to do something in dialogue with San Francisco’s venerable Mission mural tradition. He began discussions with Precita Eyes and came up with a plan to create views of the plantations of George Washington (Mount Vernon) and Thomas Jefferson (Monticello), but with black figures inserted. The intent was to point to the presence of black Americans on the plantations, while highlighting their absence from public history. The murals were fabulous.”
Spinning through space for eons,
our earth—oceans, rivers, mountains,
glaciers, tigers, parrots, redwoods—
evolving wonders.
And our vast array, generations
of humans—all shapes, colors, languages.
Can I be the only me?Our earth: so much beauty, hate,
goodness, greed.
“Study. Cool the climate,” advises my teacher.
“Grow peace.”
Can I be the only me,
become all my unique complexity?The Only Me, Pat Mora
(Belleau Wood, 1917)
“A soldier waits until he’s called—then
moves ass and balls up, over,
tearing twigs and crushed faces,
swinging his bayonet like a pitchfork
and thinking anything’s better
than a trench, ratshit
and the tender hairs of chickweed.
A soldier is smoke
waiting for wind; he’s a long corridor
clanging to the back of a house
where a child sings
in its ruined nursery…
and Beauty is the
gleam of my eye on this gunstock and my spit
drying on the blade of this knife
before it warms itself in the gut of a Kraut.
Mother, forgive me. Hear the leaves? I am
already memory.”
Alfonzo Prepares to Go Over the Top, Rita Dove
"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said,
"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever,
his remark which first explained the use of the lever
was an academic joke. But if that dead
sage could return to life, he would find a clear
demonstration of his idea, which is not
pure theory after all. That putative spot
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.
What could be more immovable or stronger?
What becomes more and more secure, the longer
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress
we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point
from which to move a world that is out of joint,
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.
Sonnets on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde, translated by David R. Slavitt.
Jason Hirata on Louise Lawler. Dia. Birdcalls (1972/1981) (Audio recording and text, 7:01 minutes).
“Yáng Shu?ng-z?’s Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize.” “It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” (NPR)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Because survival is insufficient.” (Emily St. John Mandel)
“earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it”
“The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.”
(TM)