Water (Sea and River)

Currently reading, "Sea and Fog" by Etel Adnan. This made me think of Roni Horn, and her series "Some Thames," repeating photographs of that river. Both are slippery, but sparkling. Adnan's poetry strikes watery, beautiful notes over and over again:

Sea, made of instants chained. Where to shelter impermanence 

within its defenses? A threat, for sure. What about the permanent

affinity between light and mind, both a processing machine, of

particles, of thoughts? p. 12

Impermanence, floating. Like how the body is weightless in water. Or that instant when an elevator jumps, and you are momentarily suspended in the air. Adnan continues:

Death drove fast through a black forest. Signs pointed to disaster.  

 Destiny behaved soft, terrified. Waves got transformed into

 decapitated gelatinous bodies. In the shallows, temperatures fell.

 Growths are curtailing the daylight. Despair is running free. p. 13

In an interview here Roni Horn says, "Some people live in a virtual, in a headspace; I don't. I like to keep my feet in moving water."She also says, "The Thames is the urban river with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders."

3 Poems, for 3 Days

Alas, the experiment was doomed to failure, of course. Missed the last two days. So, here we have 3 poems for 3 days. Three imposing women poets, presented in reverse alphabetical order.

OMENS by Louise Glück

I rode to meet you: dreams
like living beings swarmed around me
and the moon on my right side
followed me, burning.

I rode back: everything changed.
My soul in love was sad
and the moon on my left side
trailed me without hope.

To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.

after Alexander Pushkin

* * * * * * * * * * 

SOME AFTERNOONS SHE DOES NOT PICK UP THE PHONE by Anne Carson

It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice.

Its colours -- blue white brown greyblack silver -- vary.

Some ice has core bits of gravel or shadows inside. 

Some is smooth as a flank, you cannot stand on it.

Standing on it the wind goes thin, to shreds.

All we wished for, shreds.

The little ones cannot stand on it.

Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, can stand.

Blindingly -- what came through the world there -- burns.

It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice.

* * * * * * * * * *

SCUMBLE by Rae Armantrout 

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words

such as "scumble," "pinky," or "extrapolate?"

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that 

others would pronounce these words? 

Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the 

other person touched them lightly and carelessly with 

his tongue.

What if "of" were such a hot button?

"Scumble of bushes."

What if there were a hidden pleasure

in calling one thing

by another's name?

Day/Poem #6: T.S. Eliot

Of course, I would love to give you all a little taste of The Waste Land. But also, of course, that would be much too much and much too long, here at this time. Maybe towards the end of the month...?! So, instead, another piece by Eliot, this one much shorter but just as well written, and still one of my favorites. How could I post poems for Poetry Month without including something by Eliot?

HYSTERIA

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. 

Day/Poem #5: The Waters of Marah

Excerpts from SOUTH LONDON MIX By David Miller, from his collection "The Waters of Marah," first published in 2003. Prose poems. And why not? I especially love his use of color.

There are rooms,
rooms leading to further rooms,
joined together
like an endless road.
You could lose yourself
in these interiors...

I sit with a woman
in a room at night.
We talk
about poetry. As the night progresses
the room darkens about us,
the air cools. Inside:
there are windows and pianos.
Outside: distances manifest themselves
in roads like black tape
interrupted by the occurrence of ponds.

I am haunted by the absence of meetings. - Meetings made impossible by deaths - such as those of Godfrey Miller and Roy de Maistre. Or the cessation of meetings, either by ruptured friendship, by the intervention of distance, or again by death. There are interiorsI will never sit in, and interiors I will never know again.
*
Aeolian harp, or chimes of some sort (as we had in the room I first slept in, for a few weeks, in South London), that the wind sounds when a window is open.

Imagine the exterior of a house as being sensitive as someone's skin.

The "outside" penetrates what's "inside", if not physically, then in one's sense of a human environment.

What I am saying is obvious. And essential.

...

String unwound from her mouth. Or clouds. Floating out.
Drinking. Cups. Blue Smoke.
And earth; and light:

...

Kitchen door open
to the possibility of rain.
Walking out into the garden,
the house open to this possibility,
I think of concepts, abstract
paintings, soundings of a pond.
I think of death. The luminous
edge of life/death - the oblique -
appears more readily, at times,
at times of rain. The house
takes on other colours.

...

The task is not even to get a sense of mystery into commonplace things again. I think the job is to reassert the value (and value is not mysterious exactly, nor magical, but intangible), of ordinary things. And in doing so, find the place where tangible and intangible meet, and concrete and abstract do likewise.

Again, about simple things: someone once said that a certain line in a poem of min, 'Briar-Cup', was very beautiful. The line was: Birds flew over the river.

...

Between black and white, and colour - or rather black and white at the beginning of change, - or would it be the other way, that the colours were at the penultimate stage of disappearing? - It was neither (or both), the image suggesting tints which never quite became evident, mainly a red washed out to a sharp faintness.

Day/Poem #4: One of my favorites

OK, so all of the poems I'm going to post here are some of my favorites -- or else I wouldn't be posting them. But, this is one I return to again and again. I picked up Richard Siken's first book of poetry when I was browsing Kramerbooks, in Dupont Circle, Washington DC a number of years ago. His collection, "Crush," won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2004. This excerpt strikes me every single time.

From A PRIMER FOR THE SMALL WEIRD LOVES


1
     The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater
because he is trying to kill you,
               and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,
     because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means
                                                         your life is over anyway.
                      You're in the eighth grade. You know these things.
     You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do
               long division,
and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless
                                    he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you
                                                                                 didn't do,
     because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

********

Go check out the whole poem!

Day/Poem #3: A Child Said

As I said yesterday, I think that translators, especially of poetry, are an incredible breed. To be able to balance the literal meaning of words with the overall feeling of a poem is really incredible. That being said, here is a poem in French. "A Child Says," by Raymond Queneau, captures the best moments of poetry.


UN ENFANT A DIT
Un enfant a dit
je sais des poèmes
un enfant a dit
chsais des poésies

Un enfant a dit
mon coeur est plein d'elles
un enfant a dit
par coeur ça suffit

Un enfant a dit

ils en savent des choses 

un enfant a dit 

et tout par écrit

Si l'poète pouvait

s'enfuir à tir-d'aile 

les enfants voudraient 

partir avec lui

- Raymond Queneau

#2: St. Petersburg, Repeating

I attended the Summer Literary Seminars, in St. Petersburg, Russia, for two years. This was, unfortunately, a few years ago now, but I always think about those times and about going back. I loved Petersburg; the darkness, the mystery, something about the culture and not speaking the language. I fell in love with the work of Mandelstam at that time. I also feel that one is usually most attached to the first translation of the work she reads, and, even though it's not the original writing, treats that reading as the most significant. I first read Mandelstam's poems in translation by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin. This poem has followed me since I visited Petersburg, and reminds me of the time I spend there and the people I spent that time with.

WE SHALL MEET AGAIN, IN PETERSBURG


We shall meet again, in Petersburg,
as though we had buried the sun there,
and then we shall pronounce for the first time
the blessed word with no meaning.
In the Soviet night, in the velvet dark,
in the black velvet Void, the loved eyes
of blessed women are still singing,
flowers are blooming that will never die.

The capital hunches like a wild cat,
a patrol is stationed on the bridge,
a single car rushes past in the dark,
snarling, hooting like a cuckoo.
For this night I need no pass.
I'm not afraid of the sentries.
I will pray in the Soviet night
for the blessed word with no meaning.

A rustling, as in a theater,
and a girl suddenly crying out,
and the arms of Cypris are weighed down
with roses that will never fall.
For something to do we warm ourselves at a bonfire,
maybe the ages will die away
and the loved hands of blessed women
will brush the light ashes together.

Somewhere audiences of red flowers exist,
and the fat sofas of the loges,
and a clockwork officer
looking down on the world.
Never mind if our candles go out
in the velvet, in the black Void. The bowed shoulders
of the blessed women are still singing.
You'll never notice the night's sun.

- Osip Mandelstam, tr. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

April is POETRY MONTH!

I have been away for far too long. Since April is National Poetry Month, in order to re-connect with that which I really love, I am planning on posting a poem each day. We'll see if this actually happens, but I think it's a good goal. Last night, I read "The Deleted World," translations/imitations of Tomas Transtromers' work by Robin Robertson. Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. This edition, published in the U.S. last year (though in the U.K. in 2006) offers the original Swedish in facing pages to the English. I really appreciate it when translations do this; even though I can't read the original in any way, it's beautiful to see, and I can try and listen for the original sounds.

To Friends Behind a Border
I
I wrote to you so cautiously. But what I couldn't say
filled and grew like a hot-air balloon
and finally floated away through the night sky.

II
Now my letter is with the censor. He lights his lamp.
In its glare my words leap like monkeys at a wire mesh,
clattering it, stopping to bare their teeth.

III
Read between the lines. We will meet in two hundred years
when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotton -
when they can sleep at last, become ammonites.


-Tomas Transtromer, tr. Robin Robertson

Suspended Animation // Circular Thought Processes

To be in suspended animation: life processes slowed, without being terminated, by external forces. The process of ideas slowed, without being terminated. The process of making decisions, slowed, without being terminated. 

There are no insights to offer, no stellar advice, no directions to follow. Or there are directions, I just don't know how to follow them. I don't have the right key, and I'm struggling not to fall into metaphor.

I am not sure about the motivation/functioning/forcing. If there is no clear beginning, how to begin in the first place, at the beginning? You say to begin in the middle, and lay out the path for me. But then we can't agree on how to move forward.

Abstractions to build a wall, distractions from the actual thing. Wondering how obvious to make the entrance, or allow you to enter in.

I don't understand why we can't have a conversation about this. We're coming from the same place, it doesn't have to be an argument. I'm just as confused as you are. And equally frustrated.

The test is to push through where others would falter and quit. It's not whether you have the dream or passion or not; it's whether you follow through with it, taking it further than the rest.

Too many different ways to go, and none looking promising. Well, at least not the one that I want to look promising.

Is the opposite of suspended animation resurrection? Or is it just forward momentum? 

Fragmentary thoughts leading in fragmented direction // cold feet // city of knots. Pop up advertisement: if you died today // who would take care of your family // ? // playing with lines // feelings twisted in my stomach // a rambling migraine // first right eye, then left // waiting for the phone to ring // rambling // rambling // rambling //

Words/Definitions/Sparkling Things

Which definition of languish is more appropriate for a blog?

-To fail to make progress or be successful - or -

-Suffer from being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation - that being the Internets, dear readers. Maybe here I'm referring more to the words, not the blog. Oh well.

Have you read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester? No? You should. Really. The book came out a few years ago, but I only recently had the pleasure to read it. It's very well-written, and the story (true story!) is incredible. I mean, if you like words/dictionaries/defining things. One of the most prolific contributors to the first edition of the dictionary was an incarcerated murderer/madmen; the author can't definitively say for certain why he went mad, but one of the postulates is that he was traumatized from his time as a doctor in the Civil War, forced to brand deserters with a hot iron. It's really a tragic, touching story.

I love words/dictionaries/defining things. Growing up, my mother had a copy of the Compact Edition of the OED, complete with mini microscope to aid in reading the tiny, tiny print. I admit I didn't make as much use of it as I should have -- but it was a treasure.

Dismantling words, too. Misuse/abuse. Rhyming, spinning, sparkling things.

The Revisionist's Dream II

She dreamed and the dream was of language. She dreamt
words had yellow wings, had a thousand delicate fingers,
had big tusks, had balls - that their mutable voices rose
from some distance and carried to her on a blue wind. No.
She dreamed of water. She dreamed of a single bright leaf
tangled in a dark stream. She did. But you can't take
her literally, and the story changes all the time.
-Renée Ashley

something after a temporary halt

to resume. a space for critical thinking // cracked glass

glueing the city back together

i have decided to forsake, momentarily, capitalization here.

something meaningful, and full of meaning, from someone not me:

Any form of thought whatever requires a preparation by emptying one’s mind. You have to lance the cumulative abscess, since we know too much about everything. And there is nothing better than mindless diversions to rid us of that deadweight that crushes thought. Nothing like a good bout of obsessive gymnastics to dispel received ideas. The preparatives for thought are as mysterious as the preparatives for anger. - Jean Baudrillard

writing = thought // -distraction +mental stretching // incomplete equation

resuming a space for this preparative

hopefully you'll do some somersaults too

there are also older poems in past issues of online journals that i never posted about. read them:

Spiral Orb One - Window Conversation

Tattoo Highway 20 - I wanted to Write a Short Story

to be continued...

Waking Life

New poem up here:

Melusine

Read it! And while you're at it, read the rest of the current issue as well! :)

Hereing/Hearing Music

"On waking, the pattern of the dream fades, but its aura, ambience, timbre and tonality remain, though there is no image. It's the same with a piece of music. You have it in your mind, you can hear it mentally, but you can't summon it up as form. Or with a face, whose features and smile you can feel in a tactile way, but with no recall of what it looks like. Where on earth does this force of the dream register itself, this reminiscence without image?"
-Jean Baudrillard, Cool memories IV (51)

Please join me at a lovely concert this week:

FANTASIES AND SONGS:
NATHANIEL LANASA, SILVIE JENSEN, AND RICK QUANTZ

Wednesday, February 17 at 7PM
Bechstein Piano Centre
207 West 58th Street

Schubert: Der Wanderer
Schubert: Wanderer-Fantasy
Schumann: Kreisleriana-fantasies
Brahms: Viola Songs

Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Rick Quantz, viola
Nathaniel LaNasa, piano

Go to the Event Announcement at the Bechstein Centre website HERE.

HEAR/HERE more here as in where I will be hearing on Wednesday:

Marie Ponsot
J. Mae Barizo
Claudia Cortese
&
Nick Thran

Where: Cornelia Street Café
When: Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, 6pm
$7 admission gets you one free drink!

Marie Ponsot is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Book Review. Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo was shortlisted for Canada's Robert Kroetsch award for Innovative Poetry and Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Bellingham Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, among others. She is the author "The Concert Review" and "The Marble Palace."

Nick Thran is the author of one poetry collection, Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press, 2006). A second collection, Earworm, will appear in 2011 with Nightwood Editions. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Claudia Cortese is the recipient of Kent State’s Undergraduate Wick Poetry Award. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the poetry editor forLumina Magazine and a featured reader at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and At-Large Magazine.

Rivers and Art

Last week, back in NYC, M. and I went to the Georgia O'Keeffe and Roni Horn exhibits at the Whitney. I am drawn to the indescribable colors of O'Keeffe, and the intellectualism of Horn. The O'Keeffe installation consisted of her more abstract work, less flowers, more more more...A woman I met recently told me she loves O'Keeffe, not least because all those vaginas turn her on. Though not explicitly publicized, Horn can be found listed as a lesbian or queer woman artist. Were the curators intentional in this pairing?

I was very impressed by Horn's work. Strangely enough, this exhibit was at the Tate Modern while I was living in Oxford last year. Though I passed by, twice I think, I never went in as it cost extra to see the special exhibit. I now wish I had seen it! Since I did associate this exhibit with my time in Oxford and London, it was bittersweet for me; this deep yearning to be back there, down in my gut. My favorite piece by Horn, a series of close-up photographs of sections of the water in the Thames, entitled "Still Water (The River Thames, for example)". Each photograph contained footnote numbers in the water, in shadows, in waves, its movement and stillness; these corresponded to thoughts and questions written below the photo. I think I could have stayed looking and reading for hours. The whole exhibit, entitled Roni Horn a.k.a. Roni Horn, dealt with explorations, questions and feelings towards identity, experience, relationships.

The Thames River. The Hudson.
Identities of rivers, the people who live on them.

At this very moment, where you are is the very center of the world.


(Photo from Roni Horn at the Whitney here)

The Under World - by Melissa Kwasny

1
I had an idea midwinter. It was ruby, glistening. It was garnet,
menstrual. I would have it on my table, centered, a red rocking
thing to measure time. Which doesn't move, they say, which is
an illusion. Unemployed: traveling to the woodpile and coming
back with sticks. I know the shrunken world is an experiment.
Bird shell caught in the teeth. So far I have waited mole-eyed, the
body puffy. What huge desperation devises these tests? I open
my eyes when I haev been asked to keep them closed. I peek and
then the fascists come down on me. I have tried to be a good
therapeutic model, to choose to be happy, that jingling of coins.
But there is no room for heart in the cold earth place.

2
The world circles around me with its pack of lies. Shall I give it one last
chance? And another? ...
One lives the life one was meant to, or one doesn't...

7
Up in the air. A peculiar phrase. What does it mean that nothing's
landed? ...

9
When I broke with the earth, in grief, the animals still gathered. The iris
skimmed the pond, turning it to azure. I felt the coolness on my arms.
Re-pressed. Implying the property of buoyancy. Re-petition. Implying
the king or queen might still say yes. Though the soil still clings to me.
Though I drag my bootleg pain. Though I still believe in perpetrator and
victim. Deep need, I am bending into you. Pulverized by being. Nothing
else will wake me. Bite deep my driving hand. If I am progeny of thorns,
I am also mother of a sea of roses. If I am sea, I am anaphora. Casting a
calm above the undertow. Speak to me, work, or I will be forever lonely.
Help me to remember who I am.

-From Reading Novalis in Montana
* * * * *

What huge desperation, indeed. It is not midwinter yet. I don't think I have had an idea in a long while. Even whilst I think about choosing to do this something, I am doing something else.

How does one know if one is living the life one was meant to?

If I have not landed, I don't want to. Or maybe I do. I am indeterminate, flapping invisible wings.

I am utterly defeated by being, she says. What can remember who I am?

* * * * *

"For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae, and when the acolytes said, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.'"
-Petronius, Satyricon ch. 48


~~~~~
And moving on, with no connection to the above: Go Hear/Here Tomorrow

A Canadian Invasion!

Nick Thran (Insomniac Press)

J. Mae Barizo (Fields Press)

Moez Surani (Wolsak & Wynn)

8PM, Oct. 26

Unnameable Books

Neighborhood: Prospect Heights
600 Vanderbilt Ave
(between Dean St & St Marks Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

(718) 789-1534

Mind and the Moon

All things were together. Then mind came and arranged them. - Anaxagoras

I came across this quote by Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th Century BCE. He put forth theories on cosmology and celestial bodies, theories which ultimately of course set him in opposition to the established religious dogma.

His search for knowledge led him to conceive of Nous (mind) as an ordering form in the Universe, causing motion and the separation of object from object, like from unlike, creating the cosmos and distinguishing living bodies. Chaos refined into reality.

Anaxagoras distrusted the senses. Humans, animals, and vegetation sprang from moist clay created by mist and ether. This theory of creation, though, still relies heavily on mythical assumptions.

Though separated, all remain connected on some level. So your hand passes into mine, lightly brushing the skin. So your words, questions, sighs.

Near the north pole of the Moon, Anaxagoras is a lunar impact crater. It possesses a ray system, debris ejected during impact still extending visibly away for up to 900 km.

The Mind moves the Moon, my face in the window.

Gypsy Woman

I am between lands, exhausted from trying to keep my head above water.
The flashing lights allure me, her voice beckons me back. Languages haunting me from across the water.

This is what she said to me:
You know I had someone ask if I was a gypsy. I said maybe.
He said he could tell by my eyes.
I said those ones are tired, wait when I wake up. Then look.
And then he gave me chocolat. I love my life. haha.

I could see her lovely laugh and the rolling out of chocolat in French, lacking an e.
Lacking. There is a line from a Jorie Graham poem, "what concerns us is luck" that I always, every time, read as lack. What concerns us is lack. What concerns me, it seems.

S. speaks in French, Arabic, and emoticons. Little smiley faces to punctuate the time.
Gypsy woman is what she used to call me.