Some Blogs
 Janus Head
10.2
Special Issue
J.H. van den Berg
Travels Inside the Archive
Robert Gibbons
Edge of Maine Editions
Beyond Time
New & Selected Work
1977 - 2007
Robert Gibbons
 The Age of Briggs & Stratton
Peter Culley
|
November 18, 2009
Self-Portrait Assemblage
1916
Man Ray
d. November 18, 1976
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Nietzsche/Derrida, Blanchot/Beckett: Fragmentary Progressions of the Unnamable
Stephen Barker
pmc
What is the work of which the marginal, the parergonal, the fragmentary, is outside? How is one to map this exchange, of terms and of texts, and how will this economy of the marginal, the transgressive, the nameless, or unnamable, operate within the aestheticized space of writing and reading?
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Janus Head
Volume 11, Issues 1 & 2
What’s the ‘Matter’ with Materialism? [pdf]
Walter Benjamin and the New Janitocracy
Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
janus head
This paper examines Walter Benjamin’s argument that the matter—the materials
—of materialist historiographyare the objects that have been forgotten and discarded
by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child’s play and
children’s playthings a potential ‘playing out’ and ‘recollecting’ of that which has been
dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor
as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through
progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed
‘messianic’ history. The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive
relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary
custodian and the ‘New Janitocracy’.
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Man Ray
1945
Influence and authenticity of l'Inconnue de la Seine
Anja Zeidler
The Gaddis Annotations
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A Part Of You Lives On
Robert Gibbons
To live life so well, so rough-hard-edged, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisibly anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, avoiding the rich, if need be, so that then when death comes a part of you lives on, because to live life so well, hard-edged, subtle, discreet, intuitive, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisible, anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, avoiding the rich, if need be, so that when death finally comes, whether suddenly, or after the long ago, a part of you lives on in recollections of others, in things crafted or collected, in long-lost photos, in histories & myths, in the unrecorded & recorded records, will, letters, diaries, notebooks, love letters, write those love letters now so both of you live on, when death comes, whether suddenly, or after the long agon a part of you lives on.
Prose poems [pdf]
Robert Gibbons
janus heade
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Broken Chair with Stump
and Ballet Shoes
Man Ray
1942
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The International Literary Quarterly
November 2009
Volta: A Multilingual Anthology
(One poem: 75 languages)
Border/Lines: an Introduction
Richard Berengarten
7.
Translators, wherever they happen to live, inhabit border/lines. Translators are edge-people, bridge-makers. Translation is edge-action, frontier-culture, margin-work. And the border/lines that a translator constantly criss-crosses and transgresses, the shifting zones over and through which a translator zigzags, are located in the mind. The contours and colorations that a translator discerns in zones of mentation are mapped on both exterior and interior listening and observation; and the internal listening and observation are predicated in memory, emotion and intuition. Furthermore, the spaces the translator finds and opens in those zones, and the patterns the translator makes in them, are not just linguistic. For the translator’s (or translating team’s) necessary bilingualism itself means that the spaces in those zones are interlingual, infra-lingual, even metalingual.
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Volta
Richard Berengarten
. . . now that dusk falls . . .
King sun, rosy cheeked, day's sovereign coin,
you touch me, and my skin becomes a cornea,
my spine an optic nerve, and my body trembles
half dazzled by the pool of gold you pour
over this sea and city, and I'm blinded.
Here once stood rows — and still I know they stand —
of houses and streets, belonging to another city,
not this one you have utterly transformed.
We walk along the waterfront. The night
fishermen's boats are ready to set out,
motors chugging, paraffin lamps in the bows,
and the whole town's out for the promenade,
lovers arm in arm, and young men swaggering,
mothers and fathers, children eating ice-cream,
old men watching from tables at pavement cafes,
and the darkening hills move closer, like friendly animals.
Sweet evening skyglow, spread on hills and bay,
your arm grazes mine now, as if by accident,
like the touch of this young woman who walks beside me
with heavy hips, small steps and swinging gait,
jet hair swept back, delicate throat and shoulders
deep summer bronzed, and her olive brown eyes laughing.
I drink you, shimmering light, like wine, like music,
as her ancestors have drunk you thousands of years.
Porous city, her name is Eleftheria,
and though your scars are grey flecks in her eyes,
still, at this hour when light and light's inflections
play subtly in her face as speech or song,
hers is the ancient right to walk this quayside
as instrument and guardian of your light
collecting it in the wells of her deep pupils,
and hers, the darling freedom, to tread you like a dancer.
Darling evening, light thousands of years old,
clear throated singer, lovely as this woman,
how can I not adore the grace you cast
this city and its people in, a mould
that sculptures all it touches, the whole world?
I have become your slave, if not your citizen.
And thirsting to drink you wholly, I would fill
every pore with your radiance, her freedom.
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La Conversation
1968
Jean Paul Lemieux
(18 November 1904 - 7 December 1990)
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from
The Spell Against Spelling
(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)
George Starbuck
(....)
You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."
I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.
For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."
...(more)
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The Day of the Condour, or
How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
Ronald de Sousa
November 17, 2009
Okawa Village
Kochi Prefecture
Toshio Shibata
1 2 3 _______________________
Justifying the Margins
Pierre Joris
salt
Excerpt from book: Nimrod in Hell
... his words, no matter which language or nonlanguage they are in, are fitting in a further sense: they are babble, thus a babelian bavel, and thus connect to bave, Fr. for drool, spittle. A false etymology—but are any etymologies really “false”? Aren’t they the engine whose misfirings, rather than smooth transparent linguistic runs, drive poetry forward? A false etymology, then, possibly, but one that brings in that much despised excretion without which we would have no language. And now, looking up the etymology of “bave” it turns out that the word goes back to pop. Latin “baba”, an “onomatopoeia that expresses the babble [le babil] of children.” Or of giants. Or of the single universal language all humans once spoke in their lingo-genetic childhood. Now this bave, this spittle, this active saliva (doesn’t the word “alive” hide somewhere in “saliva”?), as George Bataille’s Encyclopedia Acephalica teaches us, is “the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement.” For spittle accompanies breath, “which can exit the mouth only when permeated with it.” Because “breath is soul, so much so that certain peoples have the notion of ‘the soul before the face.’“ Without spittle, no breath, no soul, no language—it is the lubricant that immanentizes the pneuma. But it is also, the EA goes on, that which “casts the mouth in one fell swoop down to the last rung of the organic ladder, lending it a function of ejection even more repugnant than its role as gate through which one stuffs food.” And its sexual connotations and erotic manifestations allow it to befuddle any hierarchical classification of organs. The EA again: “Like the sexual act carried out in broad daylight, it is scandal itself, for it lowers the mouth—which is the visible sign of intelligence—to the level of the most shameful organs…” The scandal of children and giants speaking in a language comprehensible (or incomprehensible) to all, like spitting in public. Neither YHWH nor Dante can let this happen. The one shatters the single language, the other gathers the now incomprehensible words of the giant hunter Nimrod but makes them, has to make them fit into his language, wiped clean of spittle.
For Nimrod’s languaged anguish cannot, and does not exceed the Dantean world, it fits exactly into the cosmotopography of his lyric epic. It is metrically exact and accurately rimes with “palmi” two lines above and “salmi” two lines below. Gentle giant, speaking nonsense in comely divine words. Not surprisingly the prissy Latin poet wants worse from Nimrod, telling him “Stupid soul, keep to your horn,” and dismissing him thus: “Let us leave him alone and not speak in vain, for every language is to him as his is to others, which is known to none.” Yet Nimrod in rage hunts still—for meaning, and he says his meaning.
Poet, translator: meme combat! We keep hunting among stones .........(more)
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Pierre Joris interview
Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook
Pierre Joris' blog - Nomadics
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Picket Fence
2003
Glenn Sloggett
Stills Gallery
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Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Richard Rorty
aaaarg - free reg. req.
If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on auronomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools - as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are dready committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the ribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.
This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the "liberal ironist."
also available at aaaarg - Rorty's Philosophy as Cultural Politics and Objectivity Relativism and Truth
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Matsuyama City
Ehime Prefecture
Toshio Shibata
Interview with Toshio Shibata
eyecurious
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from
Six Prose Poems from Four’sCore
Crag Hill
otoliths
“Love is just the language of thinking?” “But it doesn’t feed you.” The problem raised the problem of the spirit. The mailman dismounted Hegelianism and, from his pocket, snatched up all the Germans in harmony. They had a ball. I knew it to be water–earthier, not so afraid–and stood upon the shore, parrots beautiful as a dream. Keys chittered in their cages. The lake was a long oval, the fragments of newsprint, urine. I listened for sound cut off, curtains.
...(more)
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Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare & Co
8, rue Dupuytren
Nov. 17, 1919
photo 1920
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Mourning tongues
Robyn Creswell on Mahmoud Darwish
Darwish’s late verse is, in its own way, a meditation on the ways is which the self becomes a stranger to itself, becomes full of voices that are not its own. One of his most charming poems on this subject is The Dice Player (also translated by Hammami and Berger in their edition of Mural). In this long, quasi-autobiographical lyric, Darwish reflects on the many accidents of genealogy and history that conspired to make him who he is, or was, and how easy it would have been for him to turn out otherwise, or never to have existed at all. (“It’s possible that poetry might have gained more / if precisely this poet hadn’t existed,” he wryly shrugs.) In this way, the poem also becomes a matter of chance: not an act of random creation but, like the self, a complicated result of the place where one happens to be born, the language one happens to speak, the poems one has read, and the friends one makes along the way. The Dice Player is, appropriately, the centrepiece of Breytenbach’s collection. His voiceover ensures that the poem never really comes to an end, that it remains open to further transformations and translations, further accidents of history and strokes of luck. Here is Darwish, via Hammami and Berger (and Mallarmé):
This poem is a dice throw
onto a board of darkness
that glows and doesn’t glow
words fall
like feathers on sand.
I don’t think it was me who wrote the poem.
...(more)
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Daniel Augschöll
via Heading East
November 16, 2009
Colonized Waterways - Lake Ontario
Michael Fuchs
Joerg Colberg
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Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Translated from the French by Eric Anglès
RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates.
HUO: Which situationist projects remain unrealized?
RV: Psychogeography, the construction of situations, the superseding of predatory behavior. The radicality, which, notwithstanding some lapses, never ceased to motivate us, remains a source of inspiration to this day. Its effects are just beginning to manifest themselves in the autonomous groups that are now coming to grips with the collapse of financial capitalism.
HUO: The Situationist International defined the situationist as someone who commits her- or himself to the construction of situations. What were those situations for you, concretely? How would you define the situationist project in 2009?
RV: By its very style of living and thinking, our group was already sketching out a situation, like a beachhead active within enemy territory. The military metaphor is questionable, but it does convey our will to liberate daily life from the control and stranglehold of an economy based on the profitable exploitation of man. We formed a “group-at-risk” that was conscious of the hostility of the dominant world, of the need for radical rupture, and of the danger of giving in to the paranoia typical of minds under siege. By showing its limits and its weaknesses, the situationist experience can also be seen as a critical meditation on the new type of society sketched out by the Paris Commune, by the Makhnovist movement and the Republic of Councils wiped out by Lenin and Trotsky, by the libertarian communities in Spain later smashed by the Communist Party. The situationist project is not about what happens once consumer society is rejected and a genuinely human society has emerged. Rather, it illuminates now how lifestyle can supersede survival, predatory behavior, power, trade and the death-reflex....(more)
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José Saramago
b. 16 Nov. 1922
How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice
José Saramago
Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1998
Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues
...sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would tell me: "José, tonight we're going to sleep, both of us, under the fig tree". There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the biggest, because it was the oldest, and timeless, was, for everybody in the house, the fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I met only many years after and learned the meaning of... Amongst the peace of the night, amongst the tree's high branches a star appeared to me and then slowly hid behind a leaf while, turning my gaze in another direction I saw rising into view like a river flowing silent through the hollow sky, the opal clarity of the Milky Way, the Road to Santiago as we still used to call it in the village. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me.(...)
In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.(...)
Blind. The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Then the apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead.
I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don't have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all....(more)
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José Saramago: Death Takes a Breather
Goodloe Byron
The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago describes humanity with the same alien fascination with which the Belgian naturalist Maurice Maeterlinck used to describe insects. This foreign view of civilization is entirely appropriate, as Saramago looks less like a man than a Methuselahan turtle, peering around with a goggly apparatus strapped to his temple.
In Saramago’s view, the world is not balancing on a precarious pin, but is pinned to the floor by violence and power. Suddenly, the impossible becomes possible: Blindness comes to replace selective attention with something that no longer selects anything; private regret transforms into public lucidity in Seeing. In The Cave, the Vegas/Wal-Mart/Condominium/uber-complex called The Center, a simulacra of Plato’s Cave, is built atop a buried allegorical site which realizes the simile as a literal state of being. But in these novels, society also accommodates the intruding impossibility: the blind are quarantined in dark cells; lucidity is diffused by propaganda, and the cave is turned into a spectacle itself. Since Blindness, Saramago’s seemingly impossible inspirations have become finely attuned Chestertonian paradoxes, and these situations, in turn, break the smooth surface of reality, exposing the tender and often stupid mess underneath. He’s studying the human being by injecting our world with an unstable but vivid isotope....(more)
The Unexpected Fantasist Fernanda Eberstadt
José Saramago's blog
José Saramago at the ScriptoriumThe Modern Word
Blindness and Seeing
José Saramago google books_______________________
Ellis Collection of Kodakiana (1886 - 1923)
Emergence of Advertising in America
Duke Digital Collections
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Henry Gould on Unjustly Neglected Ph.D. Monographs and the American Sublime
guest post at digital emunction
Before there was a grafting, by that Minnesota poet Robert Bly and others, 50 years or so ago, onto American poetry, of semi-sophisticated, wire-limbed, thin-shanked surrealism, there was a (perhaps one-sided) debate going on, mid-century, between the New Critical orthodoxy, of Wimsatt & Beardsley, Ransom & Brooks & Tate et al., on the one hand, and one of the founding & now former critics in that wave, R.P. Blackmur, and his foremost disciple, John Berryman, on the other. This confrontation between differing ideas about the character and means of poetry is one of the main topics of a perhaps-neglected work of scholarship, published in 1984, by Bloom. No, not Harold Bloom – rather, a fellow named James D. Bloom. The book is titled The Stock of Available Reality : R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman (Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1984).(....)
How does this debate concern us today? ...(more) Henry's blog - HG Poetics
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photo - mw
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from
The Anti-Orpheus [PDF]
a notebook
Robert Sheppard
Shearsman Books
Poetry interrupts history, musicates the `facts',
makes the said of hegemonic (or non-hegemonic) history
the saying of poetry,
which will create anew; mutually interruptive
a new said of non-history
for only the said may bear witness.
against amnesia not by covering the past
or by re-covering it
but by allowing a utopian counter-memory
to refute and argue with historical events.
against anaesthesia by keeping the poetry
of saying saying saying,
the reader assembles the par/s/ts.
a history must always be shown
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Poetic Sequencing and The New: Twentieth Century Blues
Robert Sheppard
The epigraph for the entire Twentieth Century Blues project -- the chance of there being a book, a single volume, of that title at the head of which it could stand is remote -- comes from JM Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The disgraced imperial magistrate who is the novel's narrator, is forced to explain his archeological interests (in particular, indecipherable texts he had collected) which have alerted his authoritarian captors' suspicions:
They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire -- the old Empire, I mean. (p 112)
His explanation is ironically barbed, of course, but his sense of the subversiveness of the marginal or of that which cannot readily be decoded into the violent simplicities of bureaucracy is affective, and provides me with a useful analogy for Twentieth Century Blues. We can all read the object, assemble, re-assemble, it in our own way(s). This will, of course, be affected by our acquired knowledge, our perceptual schema, and by the means of the text's availability, not an irrelevant question for the non-canonical poet, relying upon fugitive small presses. We all have to start reading with what we can get, as Allen Fisher realised....(more)
Complete Twentieth Century BluesRobert Sheppard Salt Publishing
Complete Twentieth Century Blues
Robert Sheppard
reviewed by Todd Nathan Thorpe
jacket _______________________
"Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination."
-
Tycho Brahe, b. 14 December 1546
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photo - mw
November 15, 2009
Scene from "The Gas Heart" by Tristan Tzara.
Costumes designed by Sonia Delaunay
Theatre Michel, Paris, July 6-7, 1923
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High Decoration:
Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars, and the Poem as Fashion Design
Carrie Noland
Although critics have exerted much effort in attempting to clarify Cendrars' debt to Apollinaire and, conversely, Apollinaire's debt to Cendrars, the influence of Robert and Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous contrast technique upon Cendrars' work has never been properly explored. It is clear, however, that the remarkable stylistic modifications that Cendrars' poetry underwent during the year 1913 can be attributed primarily to his frequent visits to the Delaunay home. Robert Delaunay's theory of simultaneous contrast was responsible for the pastiche compositional technique of Sonia Delaunay's "robe simultanée" and, I will argue, for the pastiche quality of the poems of Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques. Introduced by Robert Delaunay and elaborated on by his wife, the technique was based on Michel-Eugène Chevreul's theory that the perception of color values is determined by the contrast of juxtaposed tones. The Delaunays transformed Chevreul's theory into a technique of "simultanéité" roughly defined by Cendrars in 1914 as the process by which one entity gains its identity through contrast with another (Aujourd'hui 71-2). Anticipating the postmodern fascination with surface juxtapositions, the Delaunays reinterpreted pictorial depth or "profondeur" as an illusion produced by surface planes of color rather than by vanishing-point perspective. It was this reconception of depth as a function of surface design that stimulated Cendrars' interest in citational pastiche....
Poetry at stake: lyric aesthetics and the challenge of technology
Carrie Noland google books
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Sonia Delaunay
b. 14 November, 1885
photo - David Seidner
Sonia Delauney
David Seidner
BOMB Magazine
A world of color would be ideal, where one could create emotions accordingly. We could live by impressions the way a blind man lives by touch. We could vivify or seduce, transmute or emote, the possibilities are endless. A world of color so fine and pure, from the deepest innermost part of the human body to the pale washed evasiveness of the white of the human eye. We could live in a constant state of aura where every feeling manifested itself by color thus removing the lie from mankind.
Sonia Delaunay entered so far inside as to reach the womb. She returned not only to primitive sensibility in terms of the universal, but also in terms of woman, of motherhood. As early as 1911, Delaunay delved into the non-objective world....(more)
 Flamencosänger
Sonia Delaunay
1915
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Poetry
Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
"literalists of
the imagination"--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
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Marianne Moore
b. 15 Nov. 1887
photo by Carl Van Vechten
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Ted Berrigan
b. 15 Nov. 1934
photo by Laverne Harrell Clark
Ted Berrigan at PennSound
Buddha On The Bounty
Ted Berrigan
for Merrill Gilfillan
"A little loving can solve a lot of things"
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. "You are lovely. I
am lame." "Now it's me." "If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave' "
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
"The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon." I'm not here, now,
& it is good, absence.
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photo - mw
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OCHO #27
Edited by Didi Menendez
and featuring MiPO's community of writers
November 13, 2009
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
1589 - 1662
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Oasis 3
Barbara Mor
ctheory
the small blue man a small man tends the door,he wears a
blue jacket,all is glassy silence bldgs &parkinglotEmpty,the
sun exists at some angle to the sky the small blue man is
almost not there,he is Tokwah who opens the door
as many years,the
close world,vinous enclosed &moistured green film,earth
enwrapt in its sweat &thick creations,who is mouth,stink
&eating who is water(jaguar,Fire) in a jungle of entropic
things he thinks he is many dreams all sensate cells,all
skins explode,Omnivorous of desire elderly blue person,or
shrunk white man,all thats left, arthritic &hypnotic,at the
turnstyle inside the door(inside the plaza inside the
wonder)aGreeter,can barely stand or move yet humbly
mechanical for the job,the doors of automatic sliding
glass,of hisEyes,open beyond mortality &theSilence
everywhere that was aWorld flesh floor,liveMezzanines
of air,anaconda flowers rain eyes lickt day&night w/
paradise,bodies consuming the display of bodies
rapturous or w/out commentary,except orange purple
yellow noise explosions in anOracular skull he counts
fireants crocodiles bats millipedes piranhas,ecstatic
merchandise heThinks bright red blood eyes as a bird
flies up this parrot screeching words &becomes a clever
man there was aTree,ocean in aTree,Tokwah hooks
out a great flood & everything drowns,rivers pour out
his orificesPissing& preachingFever his monkey tricks
penetrate himself,a slippery muscle poison always
lustful always hungry &mens milk,intercourse w/
toads,a thorn in the squirmy anus extrudes secretion
abundantly,dipt w/petals on penis& theMind he makes
semen the invention of(adultery &murder)
so that you remain dead,so
that you are dead,he madeDeath,thisBrain glows in the
dark,binocular &cruel,scares away return ofGhosts
until theWorld closes,now they come
...(more)
Oasis 1 and 2
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 The Lady from Shanghai
Is it Written in the Stars?
Global Finance, Precarious Destinies
Brian Holmes
Continental Drift
This essay inquires into the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. For that it begins not with the azure sky, but with the curve of a dark horizon.(....)
Today it is the mirror-maze of the speculative economy that lies in ruins, and the question is how to forget the impossible desires projected from the financial stars above, how to imagine other destinies. Yet what seems likely, if the current political passivity continues to reign, is that the multitudes of artificial lifeforms that flourished briefly in the glass-house environments of the financial capitals will now just fade away like the swarms of lesser creatures in Black Shoals, leaving the major predators with their weapons intact, still firing at each other. The danger is that the present crisis – with a magnitude comparable at least to that of the 1970s, if not the 1930s – will be resolved by those at the top of the social hierarchy, who are now attempting to reboot the speculative economy. In that case, the profound reshaping of social institutions required to end the crisis will be decided exclusively by them. If we want to make an egalitarian change in our world model, it’s urgent to understand what happens in the boom-bust cycles – before they are used against us once again.(....)
The lifeform of the financial markets is now animated by these meta-commodities, which lend the new cityscapes their dazzling character. But what the pulsating lights of the central business districts hide is the privatization of the social state – indeed, the privatization of government. Gentrification is the fetishism of severed democratic relations.(....)
The kind of “play-labor” celebrated by the pundits of Web 2.0 may have had transgressive connotations in the 1960s, but today it is only a grotesque parody of Huizinga’s homo ludens, or of the sublimated sexual drives that Marcuse explored in his revolutionary book, Eros and Civilization. What has disappeared from the networked cultures of casino capitalism is the willingness to engage in political conflict – even while the civilizational forces of Thanatos, or unbridled aggression, bear down on the biosphere. Now it is those aggressive drives that must be sublimated and channeled into a necessary struggle. Rather than draping aesthetic and epistemological veils over blatant expropriation, shouldn’t artists and knowledge workers seek political confrontations with those who set the rules of the game?...(more)
via Jodi Dean
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Oasis
Benny Andrews
November 13, 1930 - November 10, 2006
1 2
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Dolor
Theodore Roethke
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.
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Robert Louis Stevenson
November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894
playing his flageolet
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