dig

Category: language

  • not quite what one would choose

    “& from wherever thou willst thou gatherest me” – “steel from the belly of Aries,/Or that cold fire which plays/above the sea/White sow munching acorns in graveyards where roots/of oaks wrap powdery bones of the devas./ There, suckle at my tits. Crucify/me like a beetle on yr desk. Nod out/admist the rustling play of lizards, recognize/ epics the lichen whisper. read twigs/& leaves as they fall/ Nurture my life with quartz & alabaster/& drink my blood from a vein in my lower leg/ I neigh, I muzzle you, I explode/ your certain myth/ I crawl slimy from a cave beneath yr heart/ I hiss, I spit oracles at yr front door/in a language you have forgotten. I unroll/the scroll of yr despair, I bind yr children with it./ It is for this you love me/It is for this/you seek me everywhere/ Because I gave you apples out of season/Because I gnaw at the boundaries of the light.”

    Diane di Prima, Loba. via

    Sweetheart

    when you break thru

    you’ll find

    a poet here

    not quite what one would choose.

    I won’t promise

    you’ll never go hungry

    or that you won’t be sad

    on this gutted

    breaking

    globe

    but I can show you

    baby

    enough to love

    to break your heart

    forever

    Song for Baby-O, Unborn, Diane di Prima

  • The Necessary Fluster

    Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of uncreative writing: Goldsmith—a true heir of Baudelaire’s dandyism—advocates for the wholesale borrowing or repurposing of language from any source rather than creating “new” text. It is a radical notion in a world saturated with cliches and nostalgic references. Goldsmith’s view is about making lateral moves rather than justifying what language is appropriate for poetry. It’s a vision of language that accepts “fluster.”

    I also see Goldsmith’s ideas in direct conversation with visual art’s notion of the “found object.” An artist utilizing appropriation or a found object forces her audience to look anew—and critically—at the world. Artists and poets who do this go beyond style to pose conceptual questions: what does it mean, like Brooks or Baudelaire, to engage directly with the world surrounding you rather than looking toward the academy? How do you take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising?

    Naomi Beckwith, The Necessary Fluster, Poetry, June 2012

    Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
    of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
    The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

    Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
    places, and names, and where it was you meant
    to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

    One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

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  • AG2025_1133645a

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    An initial, fine-grained impulse is to claim an anagoge,
    The pure image not enough in its ochres and rouge

    […]

    We retreat from witness of its charnal blooms,
    Our own premonitions of decay,

    Garrett Hongo

  • AG2023_1044486a or not of them

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    There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank. (TM)

    Pleasure augers survival. (RK)

  • AG2025_1167249a or the necessity of noncompliance with pressures

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    The Poetics of Disobedience, Alice Notley, 1998.

    For a long time I’ve seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well.

    […]

    I recently completed a very long poem called Disobedience but I didn’t realize that disobeying was what I was doing, what perhaps I’d always been doing until the beginning of the end of it, though the tone throughout was one of rejection of everything I was supposed to be or to affirm, all the poetries all the groups the clothes the gangs the governments the feelings and reasons.

  • 082425

    Burner Phone 101. (Rebecca Williams)

    “At airports and border crossings, another key strategy is to minimize what is on your device in the first place. Removing social media apps, old texts, photos, and other sensitive content lowers the risk if your phone is searched or confiscated, since less will be available to access.”

    A Garden of Impressions, Emanuele Coccia. via a Luiz Zerbini catalogue.

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  • AG2025_1167426a+28a

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    When through the village lurking
        Nought gives them check or fright, 
    No watch dog dares to bellow,

    The Wolves, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

  • AG2023_1120034a or attain a life without boundaries

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    Before you go further,

    let me tell you what a poem brings,

    first, you must know the secret, there is no poem

    to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,

    yes, it is that easy, a poem

    Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings, Juan Felipe Herrera