December 2009
70 posts
Please Plant This Book →
Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book in the Spring of 1968. It consisted of eight packets of garden seeds, each printed with a poem, all gathered in a small folder.
Here is a digital version of Please Plant This Book, typographical errors and all. Seeds not included.
“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them...”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Breath
When you see them tell them I am still here, that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams, that this is the only way, that the lies I tell them are different from the lies I tell myself, that by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon, that as the sun rises and sets I know my place, that breath is what saves me, that even the forced syllables of decline are breath, that...
Youth
YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum,
Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of
endowing a living Homer.
Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth
again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with
whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and
clows fly...
WatchJames Geary on metaphors
Talking in Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to...
MAYAKOVSKY
I
My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my lcothes I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
Words! Be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your...
"Happiness"
So early it’s still almost dark out. I’m near the window with coffee, and the usual early morning stuff that passes for thought. When I see the boy and his friend walking up the road to deliver the newspaper. They wear caps and sweaters, and one boy has a bag over his shoulder They are so happy they aren’t saying anything, these boys. I think if they could, they would take each other’s arm. It’s...
One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick
Matt Kish, whose favorite book of all time is Moby Dick (by Melville), started a project in August 2009: For every page of the novel, he’s drawing a picture.
His blog is updated every day, and his site, is updated every ten pages.
Projects born from obsession never fail to interest me.
Devendra Banhart - At the Hop
Put me in your...
“Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.”
– PIERRE-JEAN DE BÉRANGER
“His heart is a suspended lute; As soon as you touch it resonates.”
Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser
- Sylvia Plath, from The Colossus
Alterity and Otherness: Frank O’Hara’s ‘Intimate... →
"Mayakovsky"
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself...
Know Thyself
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast, In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to...
“The main object of modern literature ought to be the intricacies of the human...”
– Knut Hamsun
In daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events’…But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s...
second grade diary entry
My Deepest Secrets: I like ballet a little and gymnastics more. I love being alive and sometimes I think, “not me. I’m never going to die.” I am though. I am 8 and in second grade.
Poets vs. Critics: using different brain systems... →
Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets, Jerry Maguire,convoked a group to read poems. Jerry’s idea was to bring poets and critics together in order to compare their readings. What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group. It turned out that poets and critics read poems quite differently.
The...
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and...
100 Best Last Lines from Novels (American Book... →
I’m happy to see my favorite last line of all time made the cut, at number 4 no less.
“…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes...
“Authors settle into their texts like home-dwellers. Just as one creates disorder...”
– Adorno, Minima Moralia
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, how can a body...
On Language
Some peoples, such as the Wishram Chinook of the Columbia River in what is now the state of Washington, or the Ashantie of Nigeria, have considered infants’ vocalizations to manifest a special language. For the Wishram, this language was interpretable only by men having certain guardian spirits. In such cases, the native language is in native theory a second language to everyone.
-Dell Hymes,...
When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books →
For the longest time I wondered why it took me so long to get around to reading certain books in my personal library. Last month I hit upon the answer when I took “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on a trip to Los Angeles. I had not read Mark Twain’s masterpiece since my teens but had fond memories of that most unlikely of high school experiences — reading an assigned work I did not loathe....
