ekphrasis

a full-scale rehearsal of a (real or imaginary) picture's form and content, trying for a wholesale transposition, a verbal equivalent

Oliver K. Langmead - "Calypso"

strange scifi about a colonisation ship where a schism broke out after it arrived at its destination, a planet to terra-form.

written in verse

Dominic Hoey - "THE DEAD ARE ALWAYS LAUGHING AT US"

It's rare to have a poetry bundle that makes you silent and laugh. This is one of those.

Dominic Hoey - "The moon and the night"

 THE MOON AND THE NIGHT

My dead friend's ashes on my sleeve

the wild ocean playful
like fire kissing gasoline

        you'd never seen black sand Angie
        or the stars
        naked and proud

    like you in Palm Springs
    when we fucked until the night grew weak

    I forget the last names of my problems
    when I'm with you

        but here

amongst the bones and driftwood

        I remember Todd

all the missed calls and flights

better on a next time
that never paid out

I don't wanna treat my days like money no more

by the time my friends
throw my ashes
I want to have known you

        Angie

        like the moon does the night.

Anthony Lane - "Shock and Aftershocks of the Waste Land"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.

Anthony Lane - "The Shock and Aftershocks of 'The Waste Land'"

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

Eliot would lean toward the second. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," he wrote, in an essay on Dante. "It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship." What he sought, as both a writer and a reader, was "some direct shock of poetic intensity." True to that quest, "The Waste Land" is a symphony of shocks, and, like other masterworks of early modernism, it refuses to die down. (Go to MOMA and let your gaze move across Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," from west to east. If you don't flinch when you reach the faces on the right, bladed and scraped like shovels, consult your optician.) The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless: 

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor 

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.

Lewis Carroll - "The Hunting of the Snark"

Amazing version with drawings from Quentin Blake!  Found in Fosters Books in Chiswick.

random stuff, because it's a rainy Saturday

Peter Gabriel - "My Body is a Cage" – from the Dark OST, because Gustavo Santaolalla's The Last Of Us put me in this mood. Wondering how Arcade Fire's version compares. One of the best song build-ups ever.

Reading ROCKSONG by Golnoosh Nour. Peter Gabriel's song is fitting. Good stuff, need to look up a lot of Iranian references.

Hollie McNish - "Slug and other things i've been told to hate"

Only read a little so far but wonderful combination of prose about her life and experiences followed by a few poems about this.

 

"When I am Dead, Will You Finally Shut The Fuck Up" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-sWAAjqtQ

"Megatron, Transformers" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCO-YmLT8t4 

"British Natural Breakfast" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJw9yGqBYJ8

 

1917: Shortly after the United States' entry into the First World War, the US War Industries Board asks women to stop buying corsets to free up metal for war production. This step liberates some 28,000 tons of metal, enough to build two battleships.

On the topic of selfies, this made me rethink my dislike of them: Not everyone has a garden though, do they? Or a house they can furnish and decorate. For many people, especially pooror or younger people, their own body is all they have through which to represent themselves. Their owe blank canvas. Caking yourself in make-up and taking a selfie is surely not so different from obsessing over the pansies in the front garden or posting yet another photo of your kitchen renovation.
[...]
("The Self-Portrait" in Art Quarterly) a line about selfies. While the author rejoiced in artistic self-portaits in general, writing, 'The Self-Portrait claims its unique place in the history of human culture because of its ability to map, or seem to map, the fluid transformations of human identity. Making yourself visible is an attempt to clear some space', he then went on to say, while discussing the self-portraits of Paul Gauguin, that his complex representations of self 'read as especially pertinent in today's accelerated climate of personal aggrandisement through self-representation'. (Yes, selfies.)
[...]
his aside about selfies being 'personal aggrandisement' pissed me off. I don't believe that people take and share selfies merely for 'personal aggrandisement'. It seemed a very smug tosser of a comment to me. In fact, I think using big long words like 'aggrandisement' in an article is more of a cry for 'personal aggrandisement' than taking a selfie is.
[...]
After years of being represented, or not, by other people, finally a hell of a lot of people who couldn't before are able to take their own photos, to show themselves in the light they want with the filter they want at the time they want doing what they want tos how the world who they are according to themselves.i

apparently pigeons have twenty-four different receptors in their eyes (we only  have three). So chances are, pigeons are absolutely spectacular, but we have no way of seeing them.

dublin pigeon

for Rhiannon, who has always loved pigeons

i see you pigeons!
see that neck!
all emerald!
all amethyst!

sick to death
of all the praise
those fucking
parrots get

if you were
on instagram
i imagine
your account

would be
everyday updated
with selfies
of that lovely neck

shouting:

look at me you bastards!
i'm beautiful as well

yes, but have you ever seen my tits?

i agree with you completely;
nature is a precious source
of constant inspiration;
the way swallows sleep in air;

those starling mumurations;
migrations of the humpback whale;
the balance of a mountain goat
on misted cloudy cliffs;

this planet is a wonder
of course i am in awe of it
i'm just saying: have you ever seen my tits?
because they are quite spectacular as well;

these marshmallow masterpieces
shape shift every single month
like elephants in an earthquake
to warn of coming blood

able, for almost
twelve months of their life
to shoot milk across a room
with the mere surrender of my arms;

cramping to a baby's charms
across a tesco superstore;
leaking at the mere mention
of another needy child;

at other times –
masturbation's catalys
direct line to the clitoris
a wank between two clouds
for a very lucky penis

landing pad for happy endings
two pillows for a perfect nap;
faithful office stressballs;
comfort in a bun

i'm not saying that my breasts
are necessarily better
than some birds who sleep mid-air

i'm just saying
i understand why people stare

Ingmar Heytze - "De veertig van Heytze"

Nogmaals aan het overlezen, nog altijd even goed.

John Milton - "Paradise Lost" (audiobook)

 An abridged audiobook with various actors.

transcriber (woman) - "your muse is nothing if not busy"
John Milton (Patrick Stewart) - "The call is urgent. Our world falls in upon itself. These words I take as gifts from her can shape to what we've lost. There is so much to explain."

Eva Griffin - "Soko sucking on Kristen's fingers, 2016"

 

Soko sucking on Kristen’s fingers, 2016

Eva Griffin

Hands on the window she
wears the red like a challenge
all dotted up in the parking lot.
I hadn’t washed my hair that morning just
tussled it on my way out to meet her
curls wet, tucked neat
into a baseball cap.
I can’t even see her eyes,
my own face in the frames
suspended there between
smoke breaks and grease.
When she takes my finger in her
mouth it feels like I’m being fed,
I hold her tight by the nail
of my thumb and let her wash
over me pink. Cheeks fill fast
counting the white polka dots
on her blouse until it all blurs or
turns into my open mouth or
the sun disc of my reflection or
all the buttons I’ve ever undone or
her becoming the endless pattern or
her in the doorway of our bedroom or
thick cream left in the fridge to spoil or
skin left wrinkling in the bath or
the towel peeled open, discarded or
fresh sheets screaming on the floor or
her small breasts hanging over me or
a second of breath before laughter or
sitting on the edge of the mattress afterwards
bridle roses unfurling from my chest
the vines whispering hello I love
you is it enough to make time slow
down until we are just this:
committed onto canvas
messy, half-asleep, sitting in my car and
reaching.

Sylvia Plath - "Ariel"

Morning Light

one cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and florid

Max Porter - "Grief is the Thing with Feathers"

poetry, novella?

Amazing story of a mother who has died, leaving Dad and Boys behind. And Crow. Chapters alternate between them. Who Crow is, is left to the reader. Mystical, mesmerizing.

Amazing read.





But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.




We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.





BOYS

She was beaten to death, I once told some boys at a party.
Oh shit mate, they said.
I lie about how you died, I whispered to Mum.
I would do the same, she whispered back.




Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

Philip Larkin - "Aubade"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDr_SRhJs80 Aubade By Philip Larkin I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can’t escape, Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

www.anceintmarinerbigread.com

Patrick Stewart reads a sonnet a day until COVID-19 is over

https://twitter.com/SirPatStew Sonnet XII When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prie, And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the heard, And summer's green all girdled up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard; Then of thy beauty do I questino make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake And die as fast as they see others gro; An nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. Sonnet XIII reminds me of memcache: So should that beauty which you hold in lease Find no determination: then you were Yourself again, after yourself's decease,

poetry

great poems in nice layout
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1603/in-the-rain-/

Tony Harrison - "Long Distance II" (1937)

Long Distance II
Tony Harrison, 1937

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn’t just drop in.  You had to phone.
He’d put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he’d hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there’s your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

love poetry

may i feel said he
by e.e. cummings

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)




What Do Women Want?
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.