Category: language

Neither rosy nor prim; prefers the chorus to the heap of disturbance

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Untitled (Neither rosy nor prim; prefers the chorus to the heap of disturbance) 

Locust Projects BINGO BASH!, June 9, 2023.

EVENING PRIMROSE
Poetically speaking, growing up is mediocrity.
– NED ROREM

Neither rosy nor prim,
not cousin to the cowslip
nor the extravagant fuchsia,
I doubt anyone has ever
picked one for show,
though the woods must be fringed
with their lemony effusions.

Sun blathers its baronial
endorsement, but they refuse
to join the ranks. Summer
brings them in armfuls,
yet, when the day is large,
you won’t see them fluttering
the length of the road.

They’ll wait until the world’s
tucked in and the sky’s
one ceaseless shimmer – then
lift their saturated eyelids
and blaze, blaze
all night long
for no one.

Rita Dove (via UVA)

AG2023_1045208a or never dormant

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“the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen” (OV)

“Here the tropical vines rocking vertiginously, take on ethereal poses to charm the precipices, with their trembling fingertips they latch onto the ungraspable cosmic furry rising all throughout the drum-filled nights.” (SC)

AG2023_1044814a and its magnetic draw

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Looking intensely at one image, then doing so again and again, is more or less the premise of the writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book, Affinities (2023), a text that endeavours to analyse attraction. […] For Dillon, affinity is an unreasoned impulse; the magnetic draw of an image, the way it imprints on our psyches, the way it holds time still cannot be academically delineated. But the more one surrenders to affinity, the more one can see – and the more one can learn. One can learn how to tease out a narrative, absent of language. Grace Linden, Psyche, 051723.