JULY 2024

oh, another fire, we said, watching the horizon.

spending forever trying to find the font that is used in charles wright’s oblivion banjo, because it is so rich and vibrantly black and the serifs knot into the letters like ink-drips. reading the poems I am not only astounded by their quietude and beauty, and domestic flutterings, rural light, healings which come in the shape of a leaf or a cathedral, all of which cannot be denied (after all how can one forget the momentous, early, short “reunion”: I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.), but by the sinking of the text into the page. so strikingly black! like ore harvested from the white of the page! after a long time I think I found it (obsession does pay off)—the unassuming bodoni 72, but it does not look anything on the screen like it does on the page. nowhere near as textured, nowhere near as black. . . I see my own pen tip sinking into the paper and am reminded of that miraculous alchemy. the seeping, the spreading. the black!

I am glad of how I watched the shape
Of sorrow till she turned her eyes and came to me,
And grasped me in the dark with love and terror
And secret words.

strange choices in an abraham janssens painting. delicate indeterminations. the act of choosing as an assignment of symbols.

How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.

and then more considerations on time, when reading celan. considerations on how time is a mere human gesticulation, and we can capture it in neither stillness or succession, and as such it serves not to teach us about the world but the way we process it. from paul north: “so far from being a thing, a substance, a created medium, a meaning, a concept, time gets its force by lacking a reference or a sense but nevertheless being said again and gain. time is a pure saying. it is a loquacious saying, in augustine’s sense, something you do with words leaning on a legend of meaning, an archaism growing as it is repeated, moving further and further from itws possible explanation and gaining currency and power as it does.”

We say
The dreams of night are within us
As blood within flesh
As spirit within substance
As the oneness of things
As from a dust of pigeons
The white light of wings

though I don’t find lanthimos’s alps to be a completely successful film, it is interesting in its assignment of roles, and most pivotally in how deeply estranging it can be when the roles we have become accustomed to playing—to the extent of being inseparable from oneself—are taken away from us. because whereas the self is infinite and spanning, a role is fickle; it is swept away at the tiniest fickle change from the world. I’m thinking also of herzog’s family romance LLC, which is comparable in its fascination with the act of allowing people to fulfill certain positions in our lives, and how confounding it can be when those roles are met and expanded upon in extraordinary ways, because the mind is a disruption in any performance.

and ron padgett knows something about grief, which is absurd and timeless and pointless and even laughable sometimes:

There is a lot more room left in me
though everyone I've ever known who's died is there
My mother my father say hello
to Ted and Joe and laugh with them
though Joe knows they are crying too
and that Ted is crying
and it sounds like laughter

They do this to console me
and I let them do it, to console them

like so many in the anglosphere I fell into poetry by way of the new york school—the works of which I think appeal especially to the young, not necessarily only due to its humour and its unabashed emotionality, its occasional freneticism and depth of curiosity, the way it encapsulates all of the new ways of looking as well as the old ones—but also in the fact that it is not so intent on solving everything, of providing adequate answers to all of life’s horrors and closed-heartedness; instead it presents all the variety and objects and sensations as if fleetingly through the cab’s window, the feeling and the idea that is interested in philosophy but not beheld by it. . . I’m thinking here especially of koch’s “one train may hide another”, which is wonderful and rangy and magnificently unexpected in so many ways, that uses poetry like a walk and a talk. “One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows. / One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting / By someone after Matisse.”

I came to the world before you
to train my eyes
to make out your features
amid a flood of colour,
to train my ears
to detect your whisper
amid a storm of voices

mary ruefle paying attention to capacities of creation and the occasional loneliness/occasional wonder of being only able to see out of yourself.

Between firmness and vertigo
You are
Transparent balance

the motion of turmoil coming forth in a slew of images, it’s a surrealist cause that has been taken up by so many formidable women latin american poets. . . I’m not sure why melodrama is so often see as a failure in contemporary english language poetry, and I too have been guilty of gathering on what one editor once told me was “too purple”, but it takes a great finesse and in fact, superior emotional control to apply the most outrageous and heightened language to your work and have it not read as juvenile or offputtingly simplistic. claribel alegría’s “the procession” is an excellent example of poetry that has an enormous amount of power mediated with a masterful tempering of image: think about how it begins with silence and throughout keeps that silence but is somehow wailing. . . somehow screaming.

Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight.

that loving someone is loving the ability to choose, and loving oneself is asking someone to choose you.

writing about yoko tawada, thinking about bach, thinking about jeremy denk (“Bach too loved to shock between different moods in search of a transcendent whole. . .”), thinking about the bath, thinking about reading celan in this horrible time of genocide, thinking about “in memory of paul éluard”—it ends with the word we, thinking about how rough and bashed-in that word has become—we, thinking how celan and éluard and sachs and tawada and darwish all had their own precise outburstings of freedom, thinking about “wildpeace” and how darwish spoke about amichai using the word conflict in a completely different sensibility (“Once I said in Paris that I liked the conflict between me and Amichai. We compete over who is more in love with this country, who writes about it more beautifully. I hope the conflict will continue in this manner.”), thinking about how in this vein almadhoun takes from celan, which then of course leads us back to tawada and celan and the meridian, which encompasses everything yet only ever takes what it needs. . .

Time is a hard nut. Even if you manage to crack it, and certainly lovers are more able to than philosophers or priests, if they manage to crack it, and as if it were a newborn, teach it to walk, rather than to run or fly, time has its own mind. It returns to its shell. Time prefers to hide.

as for me, I love the way that sorrentino loves beauty—the way that it is warm and never cold, the way that you feel like you know but you really don’t, the great composition it requires, and of course always alongside music. . .

you can’t have both (that’s what they say) so if you have to choose one over the other (and who says you do), I think I might choose what’s in this ellen bass poem

For there are structures of power
that defy capitalism’s monopoly on
all the major modern utilities,
gas, electric, public transit. For there
are structures of power that reinforce
capitalism’s monopoly on all
the cultural algorithms: painting, sculpture,
music, dance. Photography, film.

writing about montserrat roig and what strikes me in the time of cherries is the idea of the generation cleaving humanity into discrete segments. it feels wrong to be defined by our milieu but it has become the only inarguable distinction when previous alignments of human quality are waning and metamorphosing. but to me it’s not so much what one generation goes through as how the major historical events impact us through a certain age-point, whether it meets us at hope or at cynicism, whether it strikes us as new or a reiteration. just like how we cannot help view our present romances with the understanding of our past loves (I guess they call that “baggage”, even though it’s just “luggage”), similar political events have to be translated through the mind through the same neural path, so where the youth see revolutionary potential the old revolutionaries see a great potentiality for further sadness and chaos. . . although of course this is not all true, I remember guzman in the cordillera of dreams saying that the estallido social gave him hope, even upon the cobblestones where so many died in 1973, even while ruminating on the eternality of the andes as they watch over everything occur over and over again. but with it there was guilt; after all, he had left chile. perhaps both hope and condemnation are just different vocalisations of guilt. . . when the campus protests erupted all over the world in articulating the sheer sadness and cruelty and inhumanity of the war in palestine, my dad shook his head and said they’re just making a mess for nothing. I wanted to fight back but I had to remember—in 1989, he was in beijing.

the contrary of being together all the time, I think that’s happiness.

A stone is a negation of everything the bourgeoisie calls Nature. The land we are summoned to is not nature. It is the sedimentation of struggles against naturalized violence. Sprouting from it are hardened stones that stick in the throats of those who use hunger as a weapon. I clenched my palm firmly and applied a magic trick I learned from my Cheikh شيخ. When I opened it again the stone had become a word. Its four letters shivered every time I touched them. The راء, the فاء, the عين, the تاء. I kept the consonants for myself, and carefully buried the vowels, which no one seems to see, in various corners of the city. Then I stood by in the dark, heart racing, waiting for the earth to tremble.