These are my loose translations of a form in Ireland known as “three things there be.” Long before Saint Patrick came, the Irish thought in threes. They were a triune people, with a Celtic triune God, and they, like most Celts, cast spells, and framed their tales by the magic of threes. I have translated some Triads previously translated by the wonderful Irish poet, Thomas Kinsella. I am arrogant after all. *wink* 1. Three smiles that are worse than griefs: the smile of snow melting on the heaths, the smile of wives who to rogues their pleasures bring, the smile of a mastiff, teeth bared, about to spring. 2. Three qualities of a fair tale: good flow like rivers made from ale, full depth of thought just like the sea, and as with youth– sweet brevity. 3. Three qualities of a tale told ill: Much stiffness, like the hairs of [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan in the last several months. I know he’s not the most fashionable critic anymore, but I admire his attitude toward culture. I’ve heard some call him a “futurist” but this seems to run directly counter to McLuhan as I read him. If anything, McLuhan is a medievalist who has adapted himself to our futurist culture in order to bring a rather old timey message. McLuhan created what he called a The general idea is that for every new medium, four things always happen. 1. The new medium enhances some aspect of us or our life. 2. The new medium obsolesces some aspect of us or our life. 3. The new medium, when pushed to its maximum, ultimately reverses some aspect of our life. 4. The new medium retrieves some past aspect of us or our life. For example, the car: 1. It [...]
I wanna know which friend will die young, so I can spend more time with them now by Rachel Glaser you hurt my feelings so I lie and say, I do wanna fuck my roommate I say, We’ve pushed our beds so they share a wall dirty dishes are inevitable when you were young and bumped your head on the table your father would make a show of hitting the table when you bumped your knee in the doorway your father would kick the doorway I wanna know which friend will die so I can surprise my other friends we climb into the car, lick the cd pick the mountain with the most views L e t ’s t r y p r i m a l s c r e a m t h e r a p y S c r e a m a s l o [...]
THEATER I dropped down against the mosque wall curled my shoulders in let my feet fall apart tilting toward the rubble-dusted floor tried to still my lashes as rifles came clanging in their muzzles smelling out scent heated off a pulse I was playing dead between the dead a beast caught sight of my breath blew off my face he said: “Now he’s fucking dead” - – - WATER sign of life: can hold a world of fleets at once: requiring a new OCEANOGRAPHY: useful to mimic waves in an assault and hit shore at same time: see also HELICOPTER WAVE: SCHEDULED WAVE: descends from garden hoses to rinse asphalt of brain matter: to rinse body on steel slab prior to shroud: streams on land: in gutters: excellent solvent: ask child you want a toy: then ask you want a grenade: watch him jump and startle: date fronds shaking with [...]
Writers in the scattered nation of good poetry are, in general, perfectionists. Many greats have been known to be tight-lipped about their process and to publish only what they deem categorically best. , on the other hand, doesn’t seem worried about perfection. He publishes so prodigiously that it’s hard to imagine he spends any time revising his work. I remember standing in a bookstore a couple years ago grazing among the poetry publications and discovering that he had poems in approximately half of the literary journals—good ones, too. I remember feeling a mixture of jealously, skepticism of various stripes, and stunned admiration for Hicok’s unique voice. I’ve read a fair amount of Hicok’s poetry since then—and had many opportunities, as he remains a prolific poet. The unfair comparison that occurs to me is . But Hicok is anything but the James Patterson of contemporary poetry (if you feel like posting [...]
for David Shapiro I PARITY Underneath the garden, loose stars stapled to ribbed snail shells in octaves of sky, the revised mistranslation of a black pool expects what an inveterate tuba suggests: a broken interflow inhabiting the honeysuckle– but diction is unlivable, a plastic replica stuck in low tides, the snow’s psyche nearby, and the pool, its live-in help, third-persons the loud night, its open mouth an analogy of vowels… Such fierce quantums ingest roman à clefs, gondolas drifting on changed names below rows of dead windows. Oh, the globe’s pallor is so themelessly narrow, its doors glamorous and blind. Messy cement, set by geometrics, cannot fix it, though music’s lost paragraph can. II EVERYBODY HATES LOVE… its pale-colored loops. mental and spiritual, its woeful exaggerations primitive as tequila resonated through salt in vacuums invented by thieves– lorry lingo, islets, milkweed– and, yet, its purple-and-silver drivers get a groom’s reprieve, [...]
In a poem called “Life,” which appears in his most recent collection, (Pitt Poetry, 2010), writes: “The feeling that mysticism / is the only way to be polite…. / While I was masturbating, / more rainforest / disappeared….” These disclosures feel true—and inevitable, given what at least I believe about climate change and humans continuing to be humans. Also, these tragicomic disclosures reminds me of the “Note on Method” at the opening of Aaron Kunin’s just-released, (Fence, 2010). Kunin opines: “…I really believe that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art.” I don’t know if this belief is always true, but I’m willing to read on because I really admire the poet who’s willing to publicize it (for other testimonials of admiration see, for one, the recent ). Thus it is with humble joy that I’m simultaneously reading [...]
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift! If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted; If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides. Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression. What is [...]
From the letters of John Keats: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment.” “The faint conceptions I have of Poems to come brings the blood frequently into my forehead.” “Man should not dispute or assert but whisper results to his neighbor, and thus by every germ of Spirit sucking the Sap from mould ethereal every human might become great. and Humanity instead of being a wide heath of Fuse and Briars with here and there a remote Oak or Pine, [...]
PART 1 PART 2 Related Posts Joe Weil on Hecht’s “A Hill”
HOMOSEXUALITY by Frank O’Hara So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance! The song of an old cow is not more full of judgement than the vapors which escape one’s soul when one is sick; so I pull the shadows around me like a puff and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment of a very long opera, and then we are off! without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet will touch the earth again, let alone “very soon.” It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate. I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can in the rain. It’s wonderful to admire oneself with complete candor; tallying up the merits of each of the latrines. [...]
When they say, “Spring is in the air,” they aren’t kidding. New York City is fully abloom–and it is most certainly in the air. Yes, the tulips and daffodils are afoot in the city! Perfectly coiffed Park Avenue flower arrangements trumpet out enormous lilies at pedestrians. Petunias and pansies galore! Primped poodles in their fluffed white glory don’t give damn about signs directing them away from the flower plots, it’s all the same to them—they’re just happy to be out of winter coats. Bees of all kinds are quite busy. Poets are everywhere with little black notebooks, scribbling furiously at the crocuses sprouting up around trees in the parks. But most New Yorkers (poets included, we just persevere and suffer later) are walking around in a Claritin daze, and it’s worse than ever. Itchy eyes, sneezing, throats ablaze. Doctors are saying this year’s pollen boom is the most prolific one [...]
How do you know when you’re “done” a poem? I’m not speaking about revision, but rather, the act of writing, particularly lyrical free verse. Donna Masini once described it to me (or a class I was in—can’t remember which), as a settling in the body: a literal sense in the poet’s body that there is no more to write. What a strange way to describe it—yet, I find it has been true with me. I’ll be sitting in front of a computer, write a line, and suddenly, intuitively, I know the poem is finished. It’s a sense of relief, that sighing experience when you’ve just removed a splinter (though the process of removing a poem from your body is usually more pleasurable. Grossman speaks about the silence from which a poem comes. Silence is the place where “all men agree.” Not only this, but one must overcome silence, the gap [...]
It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I have yet to pick up the pieces. It brought me water on down that road. It took the tarp with buck’d teeth and made a tent by lifting it over the low branches of a nearby tree. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died and I’ve used all the lessons he taught me during our time together braving the elements. My right arm has burned off from the sun’s radiation and I can no longer call out at night in pain like I used to. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died from swallowing the last of the Brita filters. And even if having clean water did nothing it made me feel safe, like we were able to improve our own condition. It’s been a year since that goddamned horse died. Triple crown I lost [...]
Easier Than Learning Klingon Jason Crane reviews John Gallaher’s Map of the Folded World In the realm of wrong answers, someone always has the radio on. – “I Will Sing the Monster to Sleep, & He Will Need Me” ~ I’ve been watching the middle seasons of Stargate SG-1 again. If you’ve never seen the show, the premise is that there are Stargates that allow instant travel between planets. You step into one and step out into a completely different landscape. To get around the problem of having to invent new languages for every race of aliens encountered, the producers cut the knot this way: They explained that a particular race of evil aliens had captured many humans from earth and sprinkled them throughout the galaxy to use as slaves. So most of the folks you encounter are human. And most of them speak English, albeit with some interesting variations [...]
When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I was at in Portland, Oregon, which had the best magazine selection in the city in those days, and I picked up a copy of a magazine called . The magazine had a hole in it, and a card insert with just a black spot on it, both of which were part of that particular issue’s design. I liked it. The subtitle was: “A Journal of the Mental Environment,” or something similarly boldly rhetorically Structuralist. I was surprised. I was excited. The articles were different, advocated for political agency in a way different than any I’d experienced. I felt that naïve vitality that, at 31, seems more and more difficult to kindle. Today, I find Adbusters kind of stupid. Its lefty academicese smacks of the do-nothing superiority that masquerades as contemporary liberal revolutionary spirit. Honestly, Adbusters and your flock, what [...]