AUTUMN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM

I know you must have felt a vague, restless sensation haunting you for ages. What could it be? What is this thing, this sense of absence in the soul? Well, surely it must be your hidden need to know about the Taiping Rebellion in China during the 19th century.

amazon.com

A strange counterpoint runs all through the discussion -- either an unhinged teapot whistling in the back of the room or a pathetic ghost playing a bamboo flute in an adjoining room. At the 35:50 time-mark, it becomes delightfully annoying.

sneaky mysterious spammers

I've noticed for some time in my blogger statistics that I'm getting a lot of traffic "hits" from odd-seeming sites. It may be the case that these are spammers. It may also be the case that hardly anyone but spammers are actually interested in my blog. How deluded I've probably been to think people are actually viewing my posts! Ha.

I don't know what these odd links mean. I tried to research the problem, but all the info is too technical and over my head.

Spammers may be doing something behind my back on this blog. Maybe they are somehow linking all kinds of unholy crap to my few actual readers here. I hope not.

Why can't people just do the right thing? Why would anyone stoop to spamming, to scheming like a demented skunk? Why do spammers have such rotten minds and empty souls?

W.G. Sebald on Bookworm

This means a lot to me:

PATIENCE (after Sebald)

something to do with Sebald

a gift of nightmares

Work with me.

Let's say that all dreams are forms of nightmare. And thank goodness for that!

Even the ones that are kind of wish-fulfillments. After the fact -- after waking -- the residue of what can never be, that perpetual fading of the sought-for presence becomes not a pleasant oneiric memory. Waking up to such an absence leaves us in the beautiful atmosphere of a soft lingering nightmare.

Then there are the dreams expressing a continuum of lostness. Existential mazes of confused experience. The horror is subdued, folded into sagging planes of perplexed emotion. That is so damn groovy.

But the full-on nightmares. Those are superb. What can be better than a night of spiritual wrack and ruin? An unseen demon pounding on the door of sudden panic. Inanimate objects coming to sentience and malevolence. Danger. Possible death (a different form of wish-fulfillment) driving the soul to extremis and a grimacing delight.


All of this stuff of the night and great despond! What would life be like without dark poolings of such beneficence? A gift of nightmares is a treasure bestowed from the vast storeroom of uncanny art and deep pathological élan.

my mind is being ripped apart

Because I can't decide which of these two W.G. Sebald books is the greatest or the most meaningful to me:

The Emigrants or The Rings of Saturn.


It feels like I'm caught in a zone of permanent oscillation.

Witold Gombrowicz

My friend Regina from Greece brought these links to my attention:


The Paris Review

about Ferdydurke

There is something...

...that rings true in Schopenhauer's great thesis. Like sunken chimes suspended in a tragic lake.

And it is so bizarre. What he said is so very strange. That deep reality might be what he said it is brings on a kind of slow and haunting hysteria. Like the aesthetic trauma of dreams transfixing a mute appreciator of  the forlorn and surreal. As if Mahler is playing numinous harmonics on those sunken chimes, a siren song of fatal reverie seducing the captured imagination.

I approve of this blog:

Dylan Trigg's Side Effects.

3 more days!

We get so densed-up with metabolized function and perception. That's why certain poetry is pretty cool: it peels away varieties of normality and allows in angles of eccentric, surreal, and freeing light to stimulate the usually dormant imagination.   

Will Crawford's new book of poems Actual Tigers is pacing and is about to spring -- on September 26th.

I think his poems are worth experiencing.  

This is a book of poetry by William Crawford. Copies are available for pre-order at Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House (contact info).


From poet Jacqueline Corcoran's review:

Sometimes ethereal, others candid, noble, humane, refined, idealistic, serious-minded yet gracious, at times breathtakingly beautiful, and all tempered with a warm down-to-earthiness; you reach a vantage point, in this collection, from which to view life without the heavy blinkers of conventional limits. 

This is Will:

SARAH THE PRIESTESS

The First Matriarch of Genesis 

amazon.com

from the publisher's page -- Swallow Press

The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two different written sources based on two independent oral traditions. Nevertheless, the role which Sarah plays, in the Genesis narratives, apears to be a highly energetic one, a role so active, in fact, that it repeatedly overshadows that of her husband.

In a patriarchal environment such as the Canaan of Genesis, the situation is discordant and problematic. Dr. Teubal suggests that the difficulty is eliminated, however, if we understand that Sarah and the other matriarchs mentioned in the narratives acted within the established, traditional Mesopotamian role of priestess, of a class of women who retained a highly privileged position vis-a-vis their husbands.

Dr. Teubal shows that the “Sarah tradition” represents a nonpatriarchal system struggling for survival in isolation, in the patriarchal environment of what was for Sarah a foreign society. She further indicates that the insistence of Sarah and Rebekah that their sons and heirs marry wives from the old homeland had to do not so much with preference for endogamy and cousin marriage as with their intention of ensuring the continuation of their old kahina-tradition against the overwhelming odds represented by patriarchal Canaan.



Okay. Now this sounds neat to me. The idea of a pagan Canaanite culture in which priestesses had important roles in society is something I like to think about. And that culture beginning to fuse with ancient Hebraic culture (and trying to retain priestess stuff)  is really something to ponder upon.

In fact, if I had it in me, I would try to write a poem about this.

I must read this book

Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality

"Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin which accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, offering ghostly glimpses into the past and a tactile encounter with space and materiality. Tim Edensor highlights the danger of destroying such evocative sites in order to build new developments. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place. Stunningly illustrated throughout, this book celebrates industrial ruins and reveals what they can tell us about ourselves and our past."

considering Derrida

Derrida might or might not have been saying stuff worth the investment of my time in trying to understand it. For now, I appreciate his freaking out forms of complacent, calcified, and mesmerized thinking. 

Do I really want to try and follow Derrida's thought into his whirlpool of infinite contextuality? All I know or intuit is that there seems to be a deep world-aesthetic principle involved and a compelling metaphysical aura around whatever the heck he was saying.

Derrida -- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy


Derrida -- Wikipedia





The Science of Ghosts

revolution...?

I can't shake the feeling that wooden puppets in Vicenza are quietly plotting the overthrow of Paris. Once accomplished, splinter groups will go against the grain of a limited upheaval.

Romney is logically compelled

Apparently, Mitt Romney can only relate to rich people. To those either born into wealth and privilege or to those who have gamed the system.

It makes no logical sense that Romney could have any regard for regular people, for workers.

It makes no logical sense that Romney would have an ounce of empathy or compassion for workers.

It makes logical sense that Romney would view the poor and others of the working class as alien creatures. That Romney would have a kind of paranoiac attitude toward the unwashed masses. Those who, in his mind, exist only as envious, unexceptional, threatening others.

He's simply had no life experience that would provide for the representation of other forms of being and meaning inside his brain.

By the same logical token, the poor and others of the working class can't really understand or empathize with Romney's form of life: "Money here, money there, money everywhere. Oh my god, what am I going do with all of this money? It's a full-time job -- and it's hard -- just thinking about all my money!"

the most depressed composer in the history of the universe

Allan Pettersson (Swedish)

This is an extravaganza of sonic despair. Fantastic!

W.G. Sebald on Thomas Browne

In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortège in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne's writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation. The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world.

~ from The Rings of Saturn

a confirmation

Almost all the poetry I come across being written these days sucks. I don't know how to say it in a more diplomatic manner. I'm talking all venues -- among Facebook's millions of poets, on blogs, or in important journals. Almost all of it is so bad it makes my spirit sag. Poetry these days seems to be an aesthetic-free zone. More like a pretentious or boring abyss than a source of wonder and art.

But my inclination is to suspect there is something wrong with me. No one else seems to think most poetry being written these days is unreadable. I had begun to think my sensibility is screwed up. That maybe I needed shock therapy. Something. Because I do like to read good poems.

When I read novels or listen to music or look at paintings, I appreciate the stuff that makes the world, if only for peculiar durations, expand and deepen. Make it seem not ordinary. The effect has something of the uncanny about it. As if there is an invisible aesthetic source from which a stream of quality moves into and through certain works. Who knows what this is and how it's possible? I certainly don't. But I know it's real when, for a brief time, I wade into these liquid currents of quality. When these special works release a form of mystical opium into my neurons. A dark aesthetic bliss purls inside my imagination.

Well, I've found a poet whose work confirms for me that I'm not wrong about what I think poetry is capable of being and doing. I've found a poet whose work I return to. That's cool. And it's about damn time.

One measure of poetic artistry is measure. When you encounter lines moving with a near-perfect cadence -- like Pound's -- you know what you know. Another measure of poetic artistry is image. When you encounter images that do the suggesting and most of the saying, instead of an ego blathering a dull monologue, you know you are in the presence of an actual poem.

If you are repulsed by stuff written without an aesthetic undercurrent vivifying the stanzas, then you are pleased by something written in such a way that mood, emotion, and sense of life are cast as a work of art.

I don't like hyperbole. But I suppose it's hard to remain completely sober and offhand when trying to describe a special thing. I am pleased to report that what I expect from a poem actually exists. That's a kind of confirmation.

Who am I to be saying all this stuff? Nobody, that's who. But maybe a few curious ones will follow the links below and be pleased by what they find there.


On Tuesday, I posted a link to four Gillian Prew poems. I'm posting it again, just because.

Gillian Prew at Bone Orchard Poetry


And here's the link to her website:

Gillian Prew

on the beyond side of total freak

the rare one

There exist those rare ones who touch your imagination in a profound way. Yes, I said "in a profound way." But not just because that phrase "in a profound way" slides off the tongue so smoothly and pleasantly. I'm talking about how you can gather in an impression that permanently alters your being in space and time.

To think of spending 24 hours with such a one -- from noon to noon. No film could capture the effect. A poem might yield aspects and faint textures. A dream comes closer, because a dream is an unhinged thing -- the opening opens and the unexpected blooms so strangely.

From noon to noon, a gathering of enhanced moments. A permanent reorientation to world surely would occur. There exist those rare ones who probably don't even know they are latent centers from which new dimensions and modes of consciousness can open for another.

Human relationships are such a mystery. Some are profound. As if the aura of an intimation of a mood of a ghost has found its haunting way into an astounded soul. I'm not sure the universe is large enough to contain all the layers of poetic subtlety.   

more poetry by Gillian Prew

I suppose we all eventually discover a few poets whose work speaks to us in a special manner. Poems that open up harmonious dimensions in the space of our peculiar selves. 

four Gillian Prew poems

a real good performance

poet's sigh versus thinker's hysteria

Occasionally, a moment will come on me in which the sense of striving (all forms) seems quite odd. In such moments, I ponder the trillion to the trillionth power texts written about this or that. Especially what goes on in scientific, philosophical, and religious environments.

All that important stuff walks around absorbing its own glow of respectable importance.

As if it is all actually getting somewhere. As if the time and thought invested in it are actually altering the dimensions of being, rather than simply reorienting the synaptic contours of abstract ski-slopes inside writers' and readers' heads.

I get the strange sense that all these producers of the trillion plus texts can't stop themselves. They don't realize they are all quietly and compulsively hysterical. They are trembling out their important words not realizing it is a symptom of metaphysical stress; rather, they think it is a noble and goes-without-saying gesture toward enhanced understanding.

It is all so very odd.

I think I would enjoy important texts more if, at the end of each paragraph, was the sentence: "Oh, my god, I'm going to die!" Yes, in each peer-reviewed scientific article, each philosophical magnum opus, each profound ethical/spiritual effusion.

Our brains are adaptive instruments we use to not die. In the past, our brains were a way to avoid big hungry cats and stuff. In the long duration of figuring out how not to get eaten, our brains managed to get souped-up and quite jazzy. We figured out how to zoo most big cats. So now what do we do with our leisure time and with our massive mental survival apparatuses? Apparently, we write a lot of texts. And the writing of them per se is maybe a subconscious form of denying the end of our time and repressing the space of our graves. As if we are writing ourselves into a prophylactic dream inside World.

Until right this moment, I've had a curmudgeonly attitude toward Zen people. Those folks sitting around breathing and no-selfing. Or strolling around a rock garden to observe the transience of whatever and whatnot. Now, I have a grudging favorable attitude toward them. They are at least not writing out their hysteria in the form of ostensible knowledge.

But I think it's the poets who are most excellently cool. At least those rare poets like Tomas Tranströmer, who chart for us only moods of time and textures of space. There's something non-hysterical about that. Something that has pushed beyond the subconscious frenzy. A way of merely waiting inside stanzas of strange beauty.

reverie

Let's say we're walking toward that forgetting fog. Someone is emerging from it and approaching us. It's Novalis. How is this possible?

In this forest, we have fallen through time, and the year 1797 is damp in the air. We have forgotten the future. Novalis is sleepwalking as he moves along the leafy path. His dream is drifting toward us. It moves around and into us. Our own dream becomes older, more farfetched. We wish to hear of roses wilting and the loneliness of trees. Why did we come here? No one knows.

I'm sticking this poem...

...right here on my blog (thanks to my friend Karla, who brought it to my attention):



CITY DUSK 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald  


COME out . . . . out
To this inevitable night of mine
Oh you drinker of new wine,
Here's pageantry . . . . Here's carnival,

Rich dusk, dim streets and all
The whispering of city night . . . .

I have closed my book of fading harmonies,
(The shadows fell across me in the park)
And my soul was sad with violins and trees,
And I was sick for dark,
When suddenly it hastened by me, bringing
Thousands of lights, a haunting breeze,
And a night of streets and singing . . . .

I shall know you by your eager feet
And by your pale, pale hair;
I'll whisper happy incoherent things
While I'm waiting for you there . . . .

All the faces unforgettable in dusk
Will blend to yours,
And the footsteps like a thousand overtures
Will blend to yours,
And there will be more drunkenness than wine
In the softness of your eyes on mine . . . .

Faint violins where lovely ladies dine,
The brushing of skirts, the voices of the night
And all the lure of friendly eyes . . . . Ah there
We'll drift like summer sounds upon the summer air . . . .

a phenomenology of the uncanny

the book review

Either I am morbidly ecstatic by what this review (and book) is about or I am morbidly ecstatic about a tangential improvisation I might want to take away from it. I don't know yet. I need to buy this book (and Trigg's The Aesthetics of Decay).


From the review:

For Trigg, space and time are affective categories and not transcendental categories of knowledge. They take their meaning from the lived experience of the embodied subject.

"She Thinks I Still Care"

This old song, made famous by George Jones, has a remarkable country melody. I think it's my favorite country melody.

that Dostoevsky magic

This morning while pathologically drinking coffee, I'm thinking about Dostoevsky's DEMONS (or THE POSSESSED). I've read it several times. This morning those past readings are washing over me, and past impressions are making an impression on me.

The characters in that novel are distinctive. They are richly different from one another. I don't want to say that Dostoevsky brilliantly presented person

ality types, because I don't really believe in types. Rather, he gave us a verisimilitude of unique souls interacting in a fictional space.

Each character has remarkable depth, expression, and mesmerizing interest for the reader. When I read this novel, I helplessly fall into that space of souls. I could almost reach out and touch them.

The Beaux Arts Trio and Brahms

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Kaspar gets deposited on a city street. He stands there utterly perplexed. I'm talking utterly perplexed. He would still be standing there if some passerby had not taken the note of dubious information from his hand. 

There's something about this scene that is mind-blowing. It makes formal assessments of existentialism and the absurd seem stuffy and shallow by contrast. Kaspar is truly just standing there, with no direction home. And no coordinates of brute being.

Fantastic, man.

only listening (for Uri)

Somewhere across the water a room is speaking.
A conversant several steeped in tradition expressing
such thoughts, so beautiful, floating thoughts like Benjamin
contemplating arcades or what still lives in burnished worlds.

Somewhere here far from water,
I listen to liquid hieroglyphs sounding
from rooms of time filled with great feeling.
I hear words echoing off the lustrous surfaces
of a piano keeping its memories cushioned
between the dampers of keys where fingers
often touch old moments, unlocking Schumann.

My breath is staggered by the distance
from those spirits who speak as poems.
How could I dare even one written stanza
when I don't know the language of candles?

A young professor there, his eyes are like the sea.

"The Recipe of Time" -- a poem by Yael Tomashov-Hollander

The Recipe of Time / Yael Tomashov-Hollander

”...It means there are no partings.
There is only one great encounter.”
I. A. Brodsky

[1]

When Iosif Aleksandrovich was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

I was six years old.

That morning, my grandmother braided her love
into the falls of coal that adorned my face.

I may have been ill.

Afraid of the outdoors, as I was, I studied the Lutskian square
through a tightly-locked window.

Between me and the square was a row of violets

on the cold, wide window sill, higher
than the seat of the chair I had climbed to look and forget.

My home town was born without me and grew in my absence.

I may have been ill, thanking God who resided in the square
under the golden dome of the Pravoslavic church,

for letting me stay at home,

near the smell of dough on my grandmother's apron,

who always stood in the kitchen with her back to me,

her heart melting within her from every sudden hug –

cheek to back, arms around belly – world hugging.

And time and time again the ladle went missing, drowning in the cooking pot,

and the soft hand stroked curls of coal,

charting the recipe of time
on my heart-board with a flour chalk.

There were always words, there was a biscuit, even sugared cream.

A quick whisk, a dish from the lower shelf
and I tip-toed back to my window sill, equipped with a small culinary achievement.

An hour later, during lunch, my grandmother boasted to all

of having been greatly helped and what would she have done without me?

I was yet to learn how to conceal a smile.

I chewed thoughts and gazed at the windowpane until the merging of whiteness and light blue:

pale autumn slices, chunks of clouds and a black cross.

A scarecrow in the sky of my memories.

Copyright © Yael Tomashov-Hollander

Translated from Hebrew by Shir Freibach

When your homeland is far away, a space opens and remains open in consciousness. There, a subtle grace, a quiet elegance tints language as it moves from latency to expression.

Memory, now brought forward into lines, takes on a different aspect than mere recall or reverie. Memory, now deepened, is vivified by an aesthetic alchemy. Such a phenomenon, such an expansion of event into written meaning is called poetry.

Certain poems recreate more than just an experience. A dimension of enhanced consciousness opens for the poet and for the reader. And one can find in certain poems a symbol of tremulous protection against the persistence of old fears and early melancholy:

pale autumn slices, chunks of clouds and a black cross.

A scarecrow in the sky of my memories.

Can you dig it?

"penumbra" (poem based on a Regina Walker photograph)

penumbra

I heard a choir of women faintly
as if melisma on the calling faith
of Hildegard von Bingen.

Echoes came, remembrances
and memorials to fresh trembling eyes,
before the wings of gargoyles hectored
days toward macabre and hollowness.

This window darkly and the bars of bone
hold back, imprison, shutter up as silence
my simple spirit now left to listening.

I listen to the molten time of glass
that vibrates faintly a thousand prayers
caught and held between diamond mesh
of distance from that little girl who thrilled
to hear the steps of God invisible pacing
somewhere in the empty nave.

Yet a ghost of things still moves on my skin, into the eyes.
All myriad objects seem to shout, "Remember me!" and
this day goes holy and naive into the camera lens' ritual
hearing of confessions pouring to vast light.


The glass darkly trembles
with the echoes of melismas
faintly hoping against hope.

photo by Regina Walker -- see Rubaru

"waiting for the bus" (poem based on a Regina Walker photograph)

“waiting for the bus”

Right here in this city of motion

and deli smells and much quipping,

a silence can slant across the sidewalk.

This light is wearing itself out in such glaring!

All the sound and fury dazzles to a dead stop

for one stretched moment of great puzzling.

I am become a tall regent of unknown quality

between this great light and its mystery play

upon surface where feet are usually going,

always going somewhere beyond yesterday.

But now the light and this day have taken

the form of me, cast it into a shocked mood.

I'm no longer solid and in this wonder space

an ecstasy spreading, phantoms falling into me.

photo by Regina Walker -- see Rubaru

"self-portrait" (poem based on a Regina Walker photograph)

“self-portrait”

Just there, she glimpsed herself

where a thought fell to shadow,

pooling on a curious canvas

brushed by staggered gods

of happenstance and confetti.

The sun is curving over towers and clocks.

The city bursts one moment of a modal skein

to scatter dreaming in the naked open air.

This dark-living Ophelia floats just now,

pleased beneath streaming transient lights.    

photo by Regina Walker -- see Rubaru

on the crest of the meta-wave

I think I'm going to try and think about something. Okay. I sort of did. Now I'm going to try and put some words to it.

This is going to be rather daffy. It's going to be me trying to get philosophical.

I will try try to put words to something that jumped in my head when I wasn't looking and that is really too indefinite for language.

I'm going to go ahead anyway and make up some words. I will try my best not to sound pretentious and be so boring that you will laugh and wince.

Here goes.

First up, Chomsky and the organic, innate structure of language. Nope. I think it just bloomed spontaneously outside of our heads. It glided in on the crest of the meta-wave. The rock wanted to be called "rock," so that's what happened.

Next, consciousness itself. Just so. There is it – pow! Inexplicable, except to say that it glided in on the crest of the meta-wave. 'Nuff said.

Human relations. You don't have to get all Levinas and “otherly” about it. It's a form of meta-magic that happens when two people are near in space and time. Convergence can create a mutuality that glides in on the crest of the meta-wave. Conversation even seems to operate according to this law of the spontaneous. So far beyond determinism and free will, it's almost spooky.

Time and space, while we're at it. De facto. They also just appeared because they appeared. They are also conditioned by and ride upon the meta-wave, which must be partly composed of themselves. A kind of liquid schizo mirror effect.

A painting, a musical composition, a poem. Quality is what comes as if a riddle surfing and dancing spritely on the crest of the meta-wave. Quality wants real bad to be, so it does sometimes. The meta-wave is surely a qualitative wave. It can splash you on rare occasions.

Death. But first, life. The surface between phenomenon and meta-wave is too abstract to even be called abstract. It's really odd, man! It spreads out, paradoxically, as an atmosphere of high pressure. Until the uncanny just happens -- being. And then being, like a crazy berserk giraffe, just turns into life. Life is living because it's always just ahead of itself, pulling its physical and weird metaphysical self forward. It's too absurd for words. You can't get a bead on it with a microscope or a telescope. Or any form of critical rationality. Okay. Death sends us tiny hints (depth-chimes), alerting us to the suspicion that something gets evaporated back through the paradox. And then on to merge with the meta-wave, where it (us, cats, love) will form whirlpools and eddies of even stranger being.

What is the meta-wave? Who knows? I don't. But it might, I think, have something to do with what happens when the "Über-Law of the Über-Spontaneous" washes over and across normality, creating new shapes in the tidal fabric.

Hmm...that won't quite do. I guess it's just not possible to describe this thing that jumped into my head. Whatever it is, it must float above and beyond concept. I'll just call it an intuition about happenings in excess of given ingredients. It's like a magic wave, or something.

"Hotel California"

With Spanish guitars.

I'm on the verge...

...of completing construction of an experimental-conceptual quasi-quantum holistic computer for calculating the quantity of neurosis and cold sweat in mathematicians obsessed with triangulating the convergence of non-Euclidean gravity, clandestine energy, and laughing space.

Romney & Company....

...done got themselves blasted for being a bunch of dire quacking doofusses. Good god, what a smackdown!

debut novel by young Israeli author

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

"...as though trying to pierce a mystery...

...which is immediately comprehensible to everyone but himself."


Why We Don't Understand Kafka

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911

And a Cornell University webpage about this.

THE WHITE RIBBON

info at IMDB

Thanks to my friend Sonja Copic for suggesting this film. It's just the way I like things: unusual, European, and in beautiful black-and-white.

My impression:

A society or culture that has become too rigid and arrogant carries with it seeds of the irrational, which can erupt in uncanny, macabre growth.

GRAND CANAL OF VENICE

A watercolor by Dusan Djukaric:

Copyright © Dusan Djukaric

And my poem:

Let us write no poems tonight

about the way the shadows purled

as we approached the liquid wharf.

Mood, only mood and more of it!

To last unwritten on our moonlit bottle

that just now is making a terrace magical.

History is so weary and tomorrow is too pushy.

Let us write no poems tonight

while that dreaming water dreams

a dark strangeness for these moments.

"What Wilts is Blood" by Gillian Prew

Her poem at The Montucky Review.


A personal mood folds into the objective correlative of nature. A poem spoken with living, mysterious symbols and images, instead of with not those things.

BLUE LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS by Sofiya Yuzefpolskaya-Tsilosani

I am pleased to announce a new book of poems by poet, scholar, and friend Sofiya Yuzefpolskaya-Tsilosani.

BLUE LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS

It looks like a beautiful book, well-designed with a pleasing presentation. Sofiya writes poems I like. They are deep, evocative, and artistic. They have that certain characteristic and indefinable Russian quality, some echoing for me the aesthetic tradition or sensibility from the Silver Age. One of the chapters has English poems as well.


Interested buyers may, at this time, contact Sofiya via email for ordering:

sofiya@u.washington.edu