De Quincey

Below is an article about a guy who has been with me for over 40 years. Since that day in the high school library. When I pulled his book from the shelf.

I had no idea what I was in for, how his book would insinuate itself so deeply into me. That book did something to my head. It made me sort of eccentric, I guess.

"The Addicted Life of Thomas De Quincey"

my mother's birthday

She would have been 87 today. She loved this song:

Jerome Rothenberg caught my attention

Check out these translations by Jerome Rothenberg of traditional verse from the Indian North Americas (scroll down especially for "A Song from Red Ant Way" and extra-specially for "Navajo Animal Songs"):

selections from "Shaking the Pumpkin"

the inimitable Roky...

...from some crazy-where in Texas.




As far as I know, he's the only genuine Outsider Artist in rock and roll. Just one damn thing after another:

poet Adam Zagajewski said:

Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. 

Here's one of his books of poems:

Unseen Hand: Poems

Marina Tsvetayeva and me

She and I share the same sense of this:

Oh, Boris, Boris! How well I know the other one [world]! From dreams, from the ambient air of dreams, from the density, the essentiality of dreams. And how little I know of this one, how much I dislike it, and how hurt I have been by it! But the other one -- just fancy! -- light, radiance, things illuminated quite differently, with your light and mine!

                                                                                        ~ from Letters: Summer 1926 

More than once on this blog, I've tried to describe that ambience, density, and essentiality of dreams. The poet's words are perfect. Often I'm struck by how dreams are expressed with a peculiar depth and substance. A situational gravity. A surreal quiddity. A holistic thereness.

amazon.com

a poem by Anna Akhmatova

Along the hard crust of deep snows

Along the hard crust of deep snows,
To the secret, white house of yours,
So gentle and quiet – we both
Are walking, in silence half-lost.
And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,
Are this dream, becoming the truth,
Entwined twigs’ a-nodding with favor,
The light ring of your silver spurs...


This lyrical love poem is not an ordinary lyrical love poem. Ego's passion and pathology are muted. What stands out here is immanence, the mystery of human substance and spirit folded into time's dream. 

Akhmatova manages to lift this vignette into a different, stranger tonality than one of discrete emotional event. Amorous regard is universalized, spread to us in the warmth and magic of her lines. All lovers walk here in the uncanny space between oblivions of non-being (before birth, after death). Those silver spurs echo far beyond a masculine symbol; they ring the dream as a shared resonance: being here together.