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
Juliana Halpert on LACMA (e-flux)
“The “synchronic museum,” as he calls its new alternative, “would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.””
Ne fais jamais de peinture si tu veux vivre tranquille.
Corot, to a friend
The most inviting landscape, where we say,
“Here we may rest and make this landscape ours,”
For him is apprehension. To convey
A moment of its meaning calls on powers
He sometimes doubts possessing. In his hand
The palette with its colored spots and smears
Seems to match nothing. On the easel’s bland
And vacant canvas not a line appears
To guide him. While we gaze and shift our eyes
Accumulating all there is to see,
His fuller sight begins to realize
A world brought into being anxiously,
Where structured shapes and contoured colors show
A calmer scene than any we could know.
Thomas Carper, The Tranquil Life
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 creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat
of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath
old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note,
set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new
and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony
a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled
in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh
corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round
the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable
and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze,
loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy
on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.
Orbit Music, Jennifer Moxley
Broken Promises in Cuban Miami, Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack (New York Review)
The LRB Podcast, Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce (Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘The Divorce’, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband , ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi)
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Anne Carson.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats
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
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
The Mosquito Knows, D. H. Lawrence
Norway – Brazil 2 -1.
The Thicket. 2024. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Ray Suen.
Jack & Lula, 4:42
Franz Schubert, Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, 5:40 (Ray Suen · Thomas Nickell, Piano)
I will get me to the wood
Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars.
There come forth many maidens
to gather grapes for the leopards, my friend.
For there are leopards drawing the cars.
I will walk in the glade,
I will come out of the new thicket
and accost the procession of maidens.
After Ch’u Yuan, Ezra Pound