OCTOBER 2021
Tell how you were able to come
to this point, to unbar
History's doors
to see your early years,
your people, the others.
aidan koch making detonations from vacuums, shape made from colour, the curious made from the eternally still
proposals in public places and the knowledge that each public interchange is a still-frame that lives onward, developing their own stories, their own imaginations, in those faulty and wondrous chambers called memory
each evening the autumn sky recalls the rust-layers of flame
to act is to believe in change (I remember baldwin, and his optimism so deeply rooted in the fact that he is alive)
alice paalen rahon’s flighting evocations which turn to the oblique skies of images, so that there is nothing that can hold her
kenneth rexroth telling us the brutal necessity of poems, which is the demand of their truth-finding, which is the act of their truth-saying—the solution / of the problem of knowing / and being is ethical. / epistemology is moral—and also giving us the method by which to absolve this drastic weight, which is to avoid the imperative, to simply ask: what happens?
In this translucent
Immense here and now, if ever,
The form of the person should be
Visible, its geometry,
Its crystallography, and
Its astronomy.
kelly zutrau’s voice and its wavering, cutting, across simple evocation in search of that more complex thing, containment
to approach the most minuscule thing with enormity. to find apparent pictures of unapparent realities
dropping off donald richie and mishima for william at the coffee house
schopenhauer had said that life and dreams were pages from the same book, and to read them in order was to live, and to read them at random was to dream
desire as a performance of immortality
nabokov: this capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
sitting in the window when a line pieced from the clouds come suddenly to the page
This song that will not leave
the day alone. Will not fade
into the night.
picasso painting gertrude stein in oils, and stein painting him in words
What we have are called heads. They are nothing unless we kiss. Lips are wonderful.
I stood before a future kiss and quivered.
on what white of what page do you write to me?
t calling me out of the blue and booking us a trip to mexico
etel adnan’s soft calls to sight as it searches
what is a feeling?
wittgenstein asking what it means to point with one’s attention
the illuminations and lucent presences of movement and vivid delight between the ring of dancers in le bonheur de vivre
threading ntozake shange: “when i write i think of my friends”
it is the kinetics of desire that creates the euphoria of loving and learning, of being alive.
crying because even though it wasn’t that, it felt just like so, and haven’t I been there, so many times, before?
the vast landscape of children in the music of their being
that we look at things to imagine what it means to be looked at. that looking is wherein the inanimate borrows from our power.
listening to the marías taking long curving drives
returning to maborosi to write a poem
in a letter: the skin of men, where it is soft—have you noticed?—is softer than the skin of women.
nothing does it like synthpop
olivia laing’s bittersweet, tender questions to the brilliant men all english letters are indebted to
reading angot’s an impossible love in the small hours of a single night because there is a thrall in words
the perfect concurrence of music and landscape and movement and image in that coherence that only cinema can manage
proust and his incomparable way of knowledge of what passes and what stays
Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.
I told her a story.
the instillment of mythmaking in verse
that where words go we cannot follow, yet they create in themselves a path by which to walk, a light by which to see from, and ultimately both the origin and the destination. frenetic in activity. a rage to know. language is an order of expansion.
nearly the whole building smelling of roasting garlic and warm ceramics at amanda’s
adorno: truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.
let people see
we loved you
that we spared nothing
hélène cixous— to write as a woman is to always recover what has been removed from you by the symbolisation of your being
the complete wonderful absurdity of this serge gainsbourg tribute
umberto piersanti on the last day of october
