May 2012
8 posts
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“While Plato wanted to leave the dark Cave of physical reality and find something...”
– Anthony Gottlieb, “The Dream of Reason”
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The Loneliest Job in the World
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?, you are completely screwed, because the next question is How Much?,
and then it is hundreds of hours later, and you are still hunched over your flowcharts and abacus,
trying to decide if you have gotten enough. This is the loneliest job in the world: the be an accountant of the heart.
It is late at night. You are by yourself, and all...
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April 2012
9 posts
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Windmills
Great white arms, churning through the air, turning toward the wind; heliotropes facing the sun.
At night they blink a low red warning light, and in the calm the drone of their motion hums down into my valley where they keep watch.
When I hear this sound I think of pop-culture music reviews and some DJ some- where calling the sound “sweet” with no connection to the rain-soaked ground beneath my...
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Description
A bird with a cry like a cell phone says something to a bird which sounds like a manual typewriter.
Out of sight in the woods, the creek trickles its ongoing sentence; from treble to baritone,
from dependent clause to interrogative.
The trees rustle over the house: they are excited to be entering the poem
in late afternoon, when the clouds are creamy and massive, as if to illustrate...
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A State of Knowing
“…I suppose I ask that question about what is waiting for you in the world, then, not in terms of what you desire from it, but rather, what you hope to contribute through it. I expect that satisfaction/happiness/contentment all exist when you are doing what you feel like you ought to be doing, but there should be higher demand upon us who can envision such a possibility, and THAT is...
“A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that...”
– Aristotle
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March 2012
15 posts
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This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get. Like the fox slipping into the thicket. Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible mountain briefly visible through the mist formed of love and guilt.
- Laura Kasischke
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“Beside me, Dorcas plucked a water hyacinth and put it in her hair. Except for...”
– Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
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Platonic Harmony
Neither are the two arts of music and gymnastic really designed, as is often supposed, the one for the training of the soul, the other fir the training of the body. What then is the real object of them? I believe, I said, that the teachers of both have in view chiefly the improvement of the soul. How can that be? he asked. Did you never observe, I said, the effect on the mind itself of...
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“Poetry is not a form of entertainment, and in a certain sense not even a form of...”
– Joseph Brodsky
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Spent
Suffer as in allow.
List as in want.
Listless as in transcending desire, or not rising to greet it.
To list is to lean, dangerously, to one side.
Have you forgotten?
Spent as in exhausted.
- Rae Armantrout
That moment, staring at the bookshelf, deciding...
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Spring Season Has Begun
About freakin’ time…
February 2012
12 posts
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“…that there can be no end
to roads & tracks in our singing, that the...”
– Kathleen Graber, Another Poem About Trains
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“In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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““How is your car crash seminar progressing?”
“We’ve...”
– Don DeLillo, White Noise
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“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
But what happens when our views shift in the other direction? What happens when those we cherish in our memory become prickly and two-dimensional, when simple memories of warmth and happiness dissolve into the acid of time and reveal themselves as visions only, mere...
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My Puppets
I wake up morning snug in my bed-puppet. Not the liveliest in my repertoire, but wait, it gets better: next is my pants-puppet, bandy-legged, hyperactive, true to life, puppeting lifelike down the hall onto my waiting elevator-puppet—
a marionette—the down, down to my bus- puppet, puppeting all those nodding heads, those drowsy fingers on their so-called smart phones, and wait till...
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Who Is To Foretell The Flight Of A Word?
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde
Ernest: Must we go, then, to Art for everything?
Gilbert: For everything. Because Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But...
January 2012
10 posts
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Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) →
brightwalldarkroom:
by Edward Montgomery
Impossible Nostalgia, or
What was it that was written above the gates of Hell? “Surrender hope, all ye who enter here,” or some variation thereof?
Anyway, I just thought I’d toss a warning your way—your eyeballs will bleed, and it’ll be a while before we…
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“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely...”
– C.S. Lewis
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What to Tell Your Boss When He Asks You What He...
…that what you feel you really need is a year to sit and think?
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“Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark...”
– Denis Johnson, Train Dreams