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Edgar Alan Poe's Descent into the Maelstrom as told by Marshall McLuhan's son

#global village #descent into the maelstrom #poe #edgar #allen #edgar allen poe

"The Street" - Philip Guston (1970)

#philip guston #art #tate #modern art #lithograph #paper

this is a new project Faye Orlove & I have been working on it for the past month or so it launches tonight around midnight we are very excited if you want to know why it’s called “The Media” i will talk your ear off about it sometime how about @ our launch party? it’s this Friday @ Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge

#themedia #liz pelly #boston

Directive by Hayden Carruth

Let no imponderable lie Transfix the sweetness of the eye, Nor any waywardness command A murder in the tranquil hand. Only a careful gentleness Of body binds the mind's distress.

Traveller, There Is No Path by Antonio Machado

Everything passes on and everything remains, But our lot is to pass on, To go on making paths, Paths across the sea. I never sought glory, Nor to leave my song In the memory of man; I love those subtle worlds, Weightless and graceful, As bubbles of soap. I like to watch as they paint themselves In sunlight and scarlet, floating Beneath the blue sky, trembling Suddenly then popping… I never sought glory. Traveller, your footprints Are the path and nothing more; Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking. By walking the path is made And when you look back You'll see a road Never to be trodden again. Traveller, there is no path, Only trails across the sea… Some time past in that place Where today the forests are dressed in barbs A poet was heard to cry "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… The poet died far from home. He lies beneath the dust of a neighbouring land. As he walked away he was seen to weep. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse… When the goldfinch cannot sing, When the poet is a pilgrim, When prayer will do us no good. "Traveller, there is no path, The path is made by walking…" Beat by beat, verse by verse.

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children by Adrienne Rich

I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence. -- Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book."

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Durer's Complete Works

for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue this slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor's language

yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.

Charles Olson Reads "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27" (1966)

I'm Hot by Nick Demske

“Fire is inspirational.”

—Richard Pryor

For Jenetta

After Mims, ODB, Jeff Bezos & Danny Khalastchi

Because I’m on fire. Because I’m a church. Because I’m Richard Pryor. Because I’m Google search.

Because O snap, Branch Davidian Gideon, a real burner, cinder incinerate drunk tank caloric intake shake. And bake. And I helped.

I perpetuated the mythology. I forwarded the message. I researched the glottochronology, desperate for a great grandparent to blame. Awe shit!—I wrote a poem about “picnics” etymology, the practice of picking a nigger for lynching. The practice of coloring cluster munitions the same shade as aerial food drops.

Because I am stuck in the lotus position. Because I nuked the leftovers, back to the Stone Age. Because—opah, etc.—Lake Erie exploded. Because Michael Jackson and Pepsi and toasters and bathtubs. I’m hot. Because I’m fly, a fly, a 747 fly into a twin, I’m 808, I’m 212, I’m a kindle that spreads jungle fire like Amazon, consummates the info ecology. This is why comparisons are odious. This is why all explanations fail. Because it is real. Because it is real. Because coincidence is mythical as God. A tree falls in the forest and no one’s around. It feels self-conscious, a stereotype. O koan, I’m hot because the Hilton’s on fire. Because the conference center is burning! I’m the severed breasts of my warrior mother, an ambidextrous archer. And I am the shit the entrepreneurs have taken on her honor.

Because I have survived extraordinary violence. Because I’m sensitive, I’m passionate, spontaneous. You ain’t. Because you not. An equation elementary as water. A formula of misinformation, a river that flows like mother’s milk. Let me explain: because I drank the Molotov. Now I am the revolution. Because I myself am hell. Because I myself am the pollution wafting from the Iraqi National Library’s ashes. I’m hot. Because I’m fly. You ain’t. Because you not. This is why. This is why. This. Is. Why.

Nick Demske is 4 real. Thanks BOMBLOG for this. Check out Demske's first book, Nick Demske, out with FENCE books. He blogs here. MM

After a Greek Proverb by AE Stallings

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery. We’ve taped the broken window pane. TV’s still out of whack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query. When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry, But there are always boxes that you never do unpack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory: Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack. We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query— We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury, Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary: We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack. We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query, But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

From the first issue of the 100th year of Poetry magazine.

From "The Propositions" by Robert Duncan

3. This is THE SENDING OUT.

I see the tree. It changes. Mineral vegetable animal. Of generations. It exceeds me. Come back. Come back. Tell us of excess. What was the sign that limited?

Do not serve the tree. This is the sending. This place is littered with great stones. No more! Return to the shore we remember. Do not go beyond our knowledge. Bring back that black thing. we did not have in our story. It alone to speak, to give strangeness. In the field of the poem the unexpected must come. We wait. It does not come. There is a disturbance in the House. I had forgotten its orders. The plants ask to be waterd. If we have not set things to rights, the indwelling is not with us, there are no instructions. MM

January First by Octavio Pas trans. Elizabeth Bishop

The year's doors open like those of language, toward the unknown. Last night you told me: tomorrow we shall have to think up signs, sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan on the double page of day and paper. Tomorrow we shall have to invent, once more, the reality of this world. I opened my eyes late. For a second of a second I felt what the Aztec felt, on the crest of the promontory, lying in wait for time's uncertain return through crack in the horizon. But no, the year had returned. It filled all the room and my look almost touched it. Time, with no help from us, had placed in exactly the same order as yesterday houses in the empty street, snow on the houses, silence on the snow.

You were beside me, still asleep. The day had invented you but you hadn't yet accepted being invented by the day. - Nor possibly my being invented, either. You were in another day. You were beside me and I saw you, like the snow, asleep among appearances. Time, with no help from us. invents houses, streets, trees and sleeping women.

When you open you eyes we'll walk, once more, among the hours and their inventions. We'll walk among appearances and bear witness to time and its conjugations. Perhaps we'll open the day's door. And then we shall enter the unknown. Cambridge, Mass., 1 January 1975

M M

Erthe Toc of Erthe or Earth Took of Earth by Anonymous

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh, erthe other erthe to the earthe droh, erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh, tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

Earth took of earth earth with ill; Earth other earth gave earth with a will. Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still: Then earth in earth had of earth its fill.

ca 13th Century

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXX by Wallace Stevens

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

The robins are la-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

It is not part of what is absent, a halt

For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element—

It was something imagined that has been washed away.

A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

It is a visibility of thought,

In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

Thankful for friends, here and there. --NW

As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.

New York, New York by David Berman

A second New York is being built a little west of the old one. Why another, no one asks, just built it, and they do.

The city is still closed off to all but the work crews who claim it's a perfect mirror image.

Truthfully, each man works on the replica of the apartment building lives in, adding new touches, like cologne dispensers, rock gardens, and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.

Improvements here and there, done secretly and off the books. None of the supervisors notice or mind. Everyone's in a wonderful mood, joking, taking walks through the still streets that the single reporter allowed inside has describes as "unleavened with reminders of the old city's complicated past, but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth."

The men grow to love the peaceful town. It becomes more difficult to return home at night,

which sets the wives to worrying. The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.

The men take long breaks on the fire escapes, waving across the quiet spaces to other workers meditating on the perches.

Until one day...

The sky filled with charred clouds. Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.

Something is wrong.

A foreman stands in the avenue pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark moving towards us in the eastern sky.

Several voices, What, What is it?

Pigeons, he yells through the wind. David Berman rules. Frontman for the Silver Jews, poet, and son of an evil corporate lobbyist. Berman, on the day he broke up the band in 2002, posted a letter (halfway down the page) to his fans about his "gravest secret," and proceeded to lambast his father for being both a "human molester" and a "doltish thinker." In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement afoot, his words, both poetic and not, are more prescient than ever. Check out his book, Actual Air.

The Unbeliever by Elizabeth Bishop

He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper's head. Asleep he was transported there, asleep he curled in a gilded ball on the mast's top, or climbed inside a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride. "I am founded on marble pillars," said a cloud. "I never move. See the pillars there in the sea?" Secure in introspection he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection. A gull had wings under his and remarked that the air was "like marble." He said: "Up here I tower through the sky for the marble wings on my tower-top fly." But he sleeps on the top of his mast with his eyes closed tight. The gull inquired into his dream, which was, "I must not fall. The spangled sea below wants me to fall. It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all."

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes. This was sent to me by a very good old friend--NW

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