Category: art

(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)

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Success is counted sweetest (112), Emily Dickinson

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

Hysteria, T. S. Eliot

Another end.