There are at least a trillion-trillion...

...things to write a poem about. It doesn't matter all that much what a poem maker chooses for his or her literal theme. What matters is that a subsidiary, ineffable theme should run in parallel to the verbalized one.

The presence of this invisible, congruent, and unexpressed theme is accomplished through style, which is made up of attitude and aesthetic sensibility. Almost all the poems being written are missing that spectral element of the unspoken. Almost all the poems being written are just people saying stuff in short lines, who then declare, "I have made a poem!" Not so fast, I reply.

A poem should have something in common with a great painting or a great piece of music -- an uncanny implicitness. Something metaphysical and unsayable should haunt the poem.

You know you have read an actual poem when you realize your soul has just been made strange, when a kind of mystical paranoia infuses the nerves of your reading eyes. Something unexpected, astounding, and ghostly has been opened by the poet. You're not just reading a weather report, so to speak, of someone's neurosis or wading through a solipsistic memoir composed in stanzas. No...when you've encountered an actual poem, the laws of an unknowable physics have tilted your orientation, have altered the dimensions of your consciousness.

What is there but not written is what makes a poem a poem. See the works of Tomas Tranströmer and Adam Zagajewski.

My computer is tuned in...

...to Czech Classic FM. (I had to download the Microsoft Silverlight thingie.)

I like to listen to classical music coming from way over there. And I like to listen to Czech people speaking Czech. I have no idea what they're saying, but I'm not overly concerned about my disability. Czech sounds cool, intelligent, and cultured. I especially like to hear those female program announcers talking -- such evocative aural presences!

And when I think about classical music and Czech culture, I'm reminded of Bohuslav Martinů.

 

 

 

I have always been...

...flabbergasted to the point of stupefaction by intellectual complacency.

Self-satisfaction and metaphysical obliviousness are expressed in myriad versions. Even some folks who read W.G. Sebald manage to constrict themselves within a Sebaldness to the exclusion of anything else -- it beats anything I've ever seen! Such literary specialists have allowed themselves to become blithe and daft from hyperventilating into a single paper sack, so to speak. Yes, Sebald opens us up to a universal suspicion about the nature of time and entropy. But that opening should retain its spiritual openness. The reader shouldn't then shrink his own world view into a microscopic obsession with Sebald. That goes for any other form of intellectual pathology coalescing around a fixed idea.

The world is big and too unusual for any kind of existential complacency.

Read New York literary critics, read science articles, read writers on the performing arts, read economists, philosophers, theologians, sports analysts, cultural mandarins. Read all that stuff until you realize those folks are self-blinded to the chronic peculiarity of being, to the uncanny fact of fact and event as such. The depth of their complacency is beyond measure, therefore causing a squeamishness in their observer.

Trust instead the wandering, eclectic hobo, in black cape and drenched rain hat. He or she walks with a limp and is usually found on the questionable side of the road. He or she has a bag of mysteries slung over his or her shoulder. Restless, forever moving, our intellectual hobo has darting, dubious eyes that never settle on one object, has a physiognomy that reveals perplexed wonder, speaks a language that is not at home among the sound of smug voices.

the situation was covered

Decades ago when I was (of course) much younger, I was an unaffiliated matriculator in the science of existential freakology. In other words, I was accomplished in the discipline of total bemusement.

But I had a soundtrack going on -- the radio pumping out stuff that made it all tolerable, even groovy.

Debussy's sound world -- a marvel

Noriko Ogawa

Paul Jacobs

Balthus

An article about this painter's Symbolist and mystical orientation.

Portrait of Sheila Pickering, 1935

I'm embarking...

...on a mission of ghost and window, of duration and fragrance, of light-slant through voids between dust motes, of immanence and mystic death. 

I'm going to try and discover for myself a cogent impression of Emily Dickinson and her poems -- what that aura of her lived and written spirit might signify for me toward a paradox of reticence overflowing. 

The world as precluded tomorrowness. An eccentricity of longing and gnomic grief.

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