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Category: language

  • AG2023_1077843a or will love its darkness still

    AG2023_1077843a

    “… is everywhere

    forming invisible haloes around everything”

    Alicia Ostriker.

    “… shine as it will, The world will love its darkness still.”

    Richard Crashaw

  • AG2023_1077909a or sumptuous scents of brevity

    AG2023_1077909a

    “Dark like an armpit, bloody like a heart”

    Joyce Mansour. Translated by Emilie Moorhouse

    “… dampen with the sumptuous scents
    of time, of brevities . . . and I have sung of
    festive tendencies turned upside down.

    But can’t you do something about death,
    Lord, about limits, about all that ends?

    César Vallejo. Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert.

  • 0321170651d

    “… the absence
    I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
    without time so it can’t hold words”

    Jennifer Kronovet

    0321170651d

  • IMG_20231204_122157_HDR

    IMG_20231204_122157_HDR

    “somewhere deeper, past language, it was marked.”

    “a dignity hard won: a dignity in need of constant vigilance and protection.’ (ZS)

    “not places at all but abstractions” (JD)

  • IMG_20231128_115305 or things that I do

    IMG_20231128_115305

    quiet improvisation, New Blue Sun.

    “Art is the Tree of Life”, William Blake’s Laocoön.

    “they are things that I do

    in the dark

    reaching for you

    […]

    are you ready?

    June Jordan, These Poems

  • AG2023_1066488aab or an ordering

    AG2023_1066488aab

    ” the exotic was better fabricated than discovered”

    “the recognition that in their [Matisse, William Morris] respective societies (and it is even more true today) the mere demand for something like happiness is a kind of rebellion. They recognized, too, that art can offer the counterimage of an order in which the material reproduction of life leaves no space or time for those regions we designate as the “beautiful”.” (Kristin Ross, Elsewhere as Pastiche)

  • Dreaming of a way

    They looked long and hard …, expectant and dreaming of a way out. (SH)

    _1490353
    IMG_20231201_102512_HDR

    I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
    Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
    Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
    And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
    And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
    And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
    No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
    Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.
    Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
    And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
    And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
          Still, they remain unfinished.
    And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

    The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
    The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity. 

    “I Have Folded My Sorrows,” by Robert Kaufman

  • AG2022_2040228a or where every true thing is okay

    AG2022_2040228a

    “sneaking a touch, […] each detail was a jolt of pleasure”

    “In this place every true thing is okay.”

    “after she spoke, the smile that followed made the sun look like a fool.” (TM)