SEPTEMBER 2021
If I could
hold light
in my hand
Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up
And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction,
Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth.
jenny erpenbeck: “now the place where all of that happened is flat, like a closed book, and as I stand beside it, I know: that’s where I learned to read. the desert isn’t the opposite of a mountain, it’s just a spread-out mountain, the mountain climber reinhold messner once said. my very normal school days—which ultimately weren’t very different from thousands of other school days—only became something noteworthy when the place where they played out was torn down, when the society that shaped that place disappeared. but everything that can’t be seen there anymore lives in my head now instead, more vivid than ever. only for awhile, of course, since memories are engraved in mortal flesh, and the older I grow, the more blurred and confused those memories will become, until ultimately they are wiped away along with me, once and for all, so that in the very same place where I used to walk around in this world with my memories of all sorts of things, someone else can walk around with memories of something else.”
the utter, devastating mastery of this last line emblematic of how expert understatement in prose paves the way for the most potent and overpowering sense of feeling.
the brief, ecstatic burst of love contained singularly in the brief compartments of no-other-time and never-again
back to anne carson’s float and her myriad ways of pondering
you are my favorite violin when you sit and
peel my eyes with your great surfaces seem intimate
when we merely touch the thread of life and kiss
the way andré breton braids the all-interfering tendencies of love and tenderness in his poems (my woman with her eyes of water to drink in prison)
It’s O.K. I think
I did what I could. I think
I sang some, I think I held my hand out.
the potent sensuality, temporal and yet enduring in the artform of holding desire, as told by edward said, remembering the dancer tahia
across the flat ontario landscape in long long hours of too-blue sky, too-blonde land, and this on repeat
a conversation borne out of the strange affinity that arises out of extreme difference, in two women whose practices are in turn radical expressions of selfhood and compassion; what it means that they regard and speak to one another
the odd hope still present in dean young’s devastating “the infirmament”; the prosaic, yet still-revolutionary notion that we are formed at once from broken things
“We expect music, so we perk our ears for it; a poem can change how we hear the most mundane, deceptive texts. Placing different languages in proximity removes them from their prescribed roles, jostling them into new possibilities. And the caretakers of language, the poets, their role, the caretaking of language, is to keep it from calcifying.”
the delicious melodrama of leslie cheung and elisa chan in 誰令你心痴
a william carlos williams poem on the garden’s whiteboard
jean valentine and her simple precision: flowers are deathless. heaven is round / and everything to be is only a promise.
amia srinivasan and her wonderfully asserted approach of delimitations. “The importance of wackiness and weirdness and strangeness and audacity. I think it would be very sad if we lost that.”
sigrid nunez’s understanding of the self as an opposing force. “I don’t like men who leave behind them a smoking trail of weeping women,” said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.
reciting philip levine by the water on a night where the moon an impossible white disk in the sky
the surreal incantations of marcel schwob’s mimes, and the lyric world they move towards
giddy in debauchery and shameless lust in beyond the valley of the child.
the moonrising from my office window and its marigold hue (george oppen: the moon rose like a rising moon)
frances chung’s rambunctious, kinetic, frenetic, multiple poems that bring the mystical-socio-cultural place we call chinatown to life
films that urge toward truthtelling, for to know someone is to not look away from him
all writers who write beautifully about writing and impossibly widens this already infinite work
paul éluard addressing liberty as if a lover
If I could see you once more
I would hold you tight
and whisper,
This world’s name is The World
And only The World, nothing else
pablo neruda’s “here I love you”
emily dickinson’s swirling, indecipherable music of script
remembering romania in poems
the wish was enough
to point to the sky, say bird, and wait for something to sing.
what music does in its most transformative, transpositional potentials is to bring sound together in a tapestry that contains almost everything you want to say about the way something feels, the way something was
polly’s fifty sounds making me laugh aloud in recognition and awe and nostalgia and complication and reverence
nobuhiko obayashi’s dream of cinema and its innate possibilities of chaning, well, everything.
the exuberance in poems which sends a bright and elated ringing, poems which echo into your own presence in the world
a wish for a loved one is the defiance of terror
the utterly haunting voiceover in those long shots of red-skied night-drives in travis wilkerson’s merciless inquiries of history and juxtapositional guilt, providing the beginning of a necessary answer as to what one does in the long shadow of past-always-with-us
ad reinhardt echoing to gertrude stein. art in life is not life. life in art is not life.
picking up joy harjo’s poems on a day of reconciliation (I know it is ten years since they buried you / the second time in lakota, a language that could / free you.")
