Category: The Other

Eros, by H.D. I. Where is he taking us now that he has turned back? Where will this take us, this fever, spreading into light? Nothing we have ever felt, nothing we have dreamt, or conjured in the night or fashioned in loneliness, can equal this. Where is he taking us, Eros, now that he has turned back? II. Keep love and he wings with his bow, up, mocking us, keep love and he taunts us and escapes. Keep love and he sways apart in another world, outdistancing us. Keep love and he mocks, ah, bitter and sweet, your sweetness is more cruel that your hurt. Honey and salt, fire burst from the rocks to meet fire spilt from Hesperus. Fire darted aloft and met fire, and in that moment love entered us. IV. Could Eros be kept, he was prisoned love since and sick with imprisonment, could Eros be [...]

Ben Lerner is damn smart. In case you aren’t convinced by my saying so, you need only stop and examine one his books the next time you have a chance. Just the titles of , , and most recently, suggest that the enclosed works have elaborate scholarly underpinnings. Lerner’s cerebral poetry isn’t chip-on-the-shoulder intellectualism or self-conscious hipsterism, however, and to shy away from his books because of their rigorous erudition would be to miss a difficult, witty, utterly sincere contemporary writer. Lerner’s latest project is a sensitive exploration of how our inherited war- and commerce-freighted language might be capable of intimate expression. According to the publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the book, which is the most succinct explanation I could find of the title: “In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle.” In adopting this phrase [...]

Apologies for the pseudo self-promotion — if you’re free this evening, 8pm, come to CPR – Center for Performance Research, 361 Manhattan Ave (Brooklyn) for Projection: featuring Star Black, Stephen Motika, Brenda Shaughnessy and Danniel Schoonebeek

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our reading here in Portland. Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just , and I read at . Happily I had the chance to meet and fraternize with thethe’s own . Happily too I have had the chance to experience a temperate spring. In my new adopted home we have a desert spring, which is an entirely different beast. Anyway, it’s been good to see green grass against mud and cherry trees in blossom. All of this reminds me of the wonderful lineage of cold muddy spring poems. There’s ‘Spring and All’ By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the waste [...]

Late again. I’m at work, greedily eating the seeds of the last pomegranate in Manhattan (so far as I’ve checked below 14th St) and I bid a wistful farewell to pomegranate season. And naturally, I’m thinking about Persephone (who paid dearly for my lunch) and all this leads me here: Pomegranate Louise Glück First he gave me his heart. It was red fruit containing many seeds, the skin leathery, unlikely. I preferred to starve, bearing out my training. Then he said Behold how the world looks, minding your mother. I peered under his arm: What had she done with color & odor? Whereupon he said Now there is a woman who loves with a vengeance, adding Consider she is in her element: the trees turning to her, whole villages going under although in hell the bushes are still burning with pomegranates. At which he cut one open & began to [...]

Micah asked me to guest-blog for a day and I said yes. It was a foolish mistake, but here I am. The format of the blog is somewhat antithetical to my natural predilection for complex and rigorous argument, for graphs and citations and all the byzantine wonder that is a well written (and mostly unpublishable) literary essay (or is that different? Do I mean an essay about literature?)—I’m rambling here, and you’re welcome. I’m doing my best to adjust to the conventions of the medium. Please forgive this paragraph break. This is a poetry blog, and I’m a poet, and I’ve written many poems and essays about poetry, so you’d think I’d be a natural choice. But the thing is, I haven’t read or written a poem in some while. And it all has to do with investment capital. Several months ago, I finished a poetry manuscript and sent it [...]

Congrats to Rae Armatrout, whose book VERSED won the 2010 NBCC Award. Here’s her poem “Guess”: 1 The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious. That much I can guess. And that the view is softened by curtains. That the present moment is an exception, is the queen bee a hive serves, or else an orphan. 2 So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant. It gestures in the distance. Between there and here you ask what game we should play next week. So we’ll be alive next week, continuing what you may or may not mean to be an impossible flirtation …and props to the brilliant and charming finalist Doug Powell, whose Wednesday night reading of “corydon & alexis” and “corydon & alexis redux” made me weep: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178536 Related Posts No related photos.

I have nothing to say today, or nothing specific, only miscellany, no fashion thing has occurred to me. Here you have an image of Ferula scorodosma, the plant whose dried sap is used to make , a rather pungent spice. I received a packet of asafoetida in a box of spices given to me as a gift on my recent birthday – it tasted quite good in a stew of lamb’s neck and potatoes, simmered with orange juice and zest and some milk that had been heated up for coffee earlier in the day and left on the stove. Speaking of nothing to say, I have been thinking this week about ‘Nothing To Say,’ an intensely sprawling poem from ‘s latest collection, . The poem takes its title from the opening of John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing.’ But where Cage seems to calmly meditate his absent predicament, Lauterbach tears into [...]

When I’m blocked, blank, speechless, I fill the silence by internalizing a poem. I pick one that I know has something to teach me—some diction or rhythm that, once ingrained, might knock me free. I don’t think “memorization” is an accurate term for this practice. I prefer to call it learning by heart. It has little to do with rote remembering, and much to do with the commitment to know, invoke, embody the poem. I borrowed the idea from Kim Rosen, whose book SAVED BY A POEM illustrates the difference between using the mind and using the heart in relation to reading and learning poetry—how poetry affects us on both cellular and spiritual levels. “The healing did not come through writing poems or even through reading them. It came when I discovered that taking a poem I loved deeply into my life and speaking it aloud caused a profound integration [...]

Richard A. Barney (ed.), “David Lynch: Interviews” KM: If your paintings had sound what would it be like? DL: Different paintings would have different sounds. So This is Love would have a muffled sound like talking through a glove. A Bug Dreams would be a really shrill 15,000-cycle piercing sound. She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She Was Hurt Bad would be an extremely slow motion, muffled breaking glass sound. … KM: What kind of things function as seeds for paintings? DL: Inspiration is like a piece of fuzz—it kind of comes up and makes a desire and an image that causes me to want to paint it. Or I can be going along and see an old Band-Aid in the street, and you know how an old Band-Aid is. It’s got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some black little balls, and you see the stain [...]