Sunday, May 17, 2020
SAMUEL R. DELANY
____________________
There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
- - - - -
ei·do·lon (īˈdōlən/)
noun
There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky’s variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.
- - - - -
ei·do·lon (īˈdōlən/)
noun
- an idealized person or thing.
- a spectre or phantom.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
WILLIAM KRISTOL
The Washington Post, May 12, 2020
I have been surprised by the total capitulation to Trump. I never liked the, Well, in private, they say this. I mean, at some point, that is not an excuse; it’s almost meaningless. People’s behavior in public, if you’re a public official, is your behavior. It really came to a head on impeachment, where we fought hard trying to get Republicans to do the right thing and failed entirely, except for Romney. I think that brought home to me, and should have brought home to everyone, that Republican members of Congress should get zero credit for saying things in private that they’re not willing to say in public. At least the true believers believe it, right? I mean, is going along really a more admirable stance? Is being a cynical apparatchik better than being a true believer?
The Washington Post, May 12, 2020
I have been surprised by the total capitulation to Trump. I never liked the, Well, in private, they say this. I mean, at some point, that is not an excuse; it’s almost meaningless. People’s behavior in public, if you’re a public official, is your behavior. It really came to a head on impeachment, where we fought hard trying to get Republicans to do the right thing and failed entirely, except for Romney. I think that brought home to me, and should have brought home to everyone, that Republican members of Congress should get zero credit for saying things in private that they’re not willing to say in public. At least the true believers believe it, right? I mean, is going along really a more admirable stance? Is being a cynical apparatchik better than being a true believer?
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
SAMUEL R. DELANY
“The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire”
____________________
“The Rhetoric of Sex, The Discourse of Desire”
____________________
One would almost think that they [straight white males] felt empowered to take anything the society produced, no matter how marginal, and utilize it for their own ends — dare we say “exploit it”? — certainly to take advantage of it as long as it’s around. And could this possibly be an effect of discourse? Perhaps it might even be one we on the margins might reasonably appropriate to our profit … or perhaps some of us already have.
Monday, May 11, 2020
ADRIENNE RICH
"The Snow Queen"
Child with a chip of mirror in his eye
Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice
Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises,
Under my lids a splinter sharp as his
Has made me wish you lying dead
Whose image digs the needle deeper still.
In the deceptive province of my birth
I have seen yes turn no, the saints descend
Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,
The stars gone lechering, the village spring
Gush mud and toads—all miracles
Befitting an incalculable age.
To love a human face was to discover
The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow,
Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh
That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,
While at the window peer two crones
Who once were Juliet and Jessica.
No matter, since I kept a little while
One thing intact from that perversity—
While landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.
In you belonged simplicities of light
To cool the vision, teach the air
To shine, the stars to find their way again.
Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will
Commands me, and your face has lost its power,
Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.
Under my ribs a diamond splinter now
Sticks, and is rooted; only you
Deny the frozen spear that drives me through.
"The Snow Queen"
Child with a chip of mirror in his eye
Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice
Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises,
Under my lids a splinter sharp as his
Has made me wish you lying dead
Whose image digs the needle deeper still.
In the deceptive province of my birth
I have seen yes turn no, the saints descend
Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,
The stars gone lechering, the village spring
Gush mud and toads—all miracles
Befitting an incalculable age.
To love a human face was to discover
The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow,
Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh
That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,
While at the window peer two crones
Who once were Juliet and Jessica.
No matter, since I kept a little while
One thing intact from that perversity—
While landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.
In you belonged simplicities of light
To cool the vision, teach the air
To shine, the stars to find their way again.
Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will
Commands me, and your face has lost its power,
Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.
Under my ribs a diamond splinter now
Sticks, and is rooted; only you
Deny the frozen spear that drives me through.
DENISE LEVERTOV
"Sound of the Axe"
Once a woman went into the woods.
The birds were silent. Why? she said.
Thunder, they told her,
thunder is coming.
She walked on, and the trees were dark
and rustled their leaves. Why? she said.
The great storm, they told her,
the great storm is coming.
She came to the river, it rushed by
without reply, she crossed the bridge,
she began to climb
up to the ridge where grey rocks
bleached themselves, waiting
for crack of doom,
and the hermit
had his hut, the wise man
who had lived since time began.
When she came to the hut
there was no one.
But she heard his axe.
She heard
the listening forest.
She dared not follow the sound
of the axe. Was it
the world-tree he was felling?
Was this the day?
The Paris Review - Issue 79 (Spring 1981)
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Friday, May 8, 2020
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
"My Favorite Poets"
My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries
and different ages
surrounded by ordinariness
by good people and bad
they lived modestly
like an apple in an orchard
They loved clouds
they lifted their heads
a great armada
of light and shade
sailed above them
a film was playing
that still hasn’t ended
Moments of bitterness
passed swiftly
likewise moments of joy
Sometimes they knew
what the world was
and wrote hard words
on soft paper
Sometimes they knew nothing
and were like children
on a school playground
when the first drop
of warm rain
descends
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
The Paris Review - Issue 226 (Fall 2018)
"My Favorite Poets"
My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries
and different ages
surrounded by ordinariness
by good people and bad
they lived modestly
like an apple in an orchard
They loved clouds
they lifted their heads
a great armada
of light and shade
sailed above them
a film was playing
that still hasn’t ended
Moments of bitterness
passed swiftly
likewise moments of joy
Sometimes they knew
what the world was
and wrote hard words
on soft paper
Sometimes they knew nothing
and were like children
on a school playground
when the first drop
of warm rain
descends
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
The Paris Review - Issue 226 (Fall 2018)
JAMES MERRILL
“The Nihilist as Hero”
____________________
“The Nihilist as Hero”
____________________
All our French poets can turn an inspired line;
who has written six passable in sequence?’
said Valéry. That was a happy day for Satan….
I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,
but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log,
beautiful unchanging fire of childhood
betraying a monotony of vision….
Life by definition breeds on change,
each season we scrap new cars and wars and women.
But sometimes when I am ill or delicate,
the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green,
a cornstalk in green tails and seeded tassel….
A nihilist wants to live in the world as is,
and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble.
Robert Lowell, “The Nihilist as Hero”
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
ADRIENNE RICH
____________________
One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum.
What you can learn [in college] is how men have perceived and organized their experience, their history, their ideas of social relationships, good and evil, sickness and health, etc. When you read or hear about “great issues,” “major texts,” “the mainstream of Western thought,” you are hearing about what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important.
Monday, May 4, 2020
STEPHEN DUNN
“Before the Sky Darkens”
____________________
Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy—maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to. At least then
there might be moments of vanishing beauty
before the sky darkens,
and the expectation of happiness
would hardly exist
and therefore might be possible.
More and more you learn to live
with the unacceptable.
You sense the ever-hidden God
retreating even farther,
terrified or embarrassed.
You might as well be a clown,
big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.
Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy—maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to. At least then
there might be moments of vanishing beauty
before the sky darkens,
and the expectation of happiness
would hardly exist
and therefore might be possible.
More and more you learn to live
with the unacceptable.
You sense the ever-hidden God
retreating even farther,
terrified or embarrassed.
You might as well be a clown,
big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Friday, May 1, 2020
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
“Gitanjali 35″
____________________
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
“Gitanjali 35″
____________________
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
MARY KARR
"Homo Perfectus Immaculately Conceives Himself"
To keep his blessed armor hard he ate
lean meat, cruciferous greens, few
grains. He liked his instants
parceled out in reps and sets, and he was glad
to dangle like an ape from an iron bar, admiring
his bicep bulge (amen): He worked hard
the slant board, the oblique
twist, and his own form
waxed and polished, his house a bleached vault
where he lit votive candles to the clear
persistence of his little self though no one else
showed up. He liked
the slammed door, the map’s red line, to stomp
a clutch, to clutch the black wheel, to wheel
away in steaming rage.
He was a preacher fond
of Revelation. His truth was slant,
his facts oblique. He sought a righteous girl, articulate,
whose slang he could steal
for his opaque and soporific sermons—
a girl all clean and bare in her nethers with mouth
of Cupid’s bow—someone
to dress in white and hold
struggling under water, to warp
the iron of, till she melted. To her
he gave and gave. He gave all
the all he had, which wasn’t much.
If you enjoyed this poem, why not read …
The Paris Review - Issue 178 (Fall 2006)
"Homo Perfectus Immaculately Conceives Himself"
To keep his blessed armor hard he ate
lean meat, cruciferous greens, few
grains. He liked his instants
parceled out in reps and sets, and he was glad
to dangle like an ape from an iron bar, admiring
his bicep bulge (amen): He worked hard
the slant board, the oblique
twist, and his own form
waxed and polished, his house a bleached vault
where he lit votive candles to the clear
persistence of his little self though no one else
showed up. He liked
the slammed door, the map’s red line, to stomp
a clutch, to clutch the black wheel, to wheel
away in steaming rage.
He was a preacher fond
of Revelation. His truth was slant,
his facts oblique. He sought a righteous girl, articulate,
whose slang he could steal
for his opaque and soporific sermons—
a girl all clean and bare in her nethers with mouth
of Cupid’s bow—someone
to dress in white and hold
struggling under water, to warp
the iron of, till she melted. To her
he gave and gave. He gave all
the all he had, which wasn’t much.
If you enjoyed this poem, why not read …
The Paris Review - Issue 178 (Fall 2006)
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