poetic flummery

[poeticflummery]

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

Sherry Turkle, from Reclaiming Conversation

[lovelyarc-blog]

I have a new home on the internet, so I won’t be updating my stuff here anymore. It’s here: zacharyschomburg.net. It was made by Brandi Katherine Herrera. I’ll see you over there. 

[poeticflummery]

search engine. // marsupial lactation, sisters rodeo, nervous system, eczema (face), flights (cuba), baby elephant costume, crewel embroidery, walgreens (sandy), brain, lungs, balmorhea // or, accidental in-bed portrait w/ last twelve googled.

[poeticflummery]

of the stellar spaces. // "life—the real living, teeming, magical chaos of things, through which we move—has all sorts of levels, planes, dimensions, regions, strata, stage-sets, dream-visions, corridors, vistas, horizons, retreats, escapes, worlds-within-worlds, worlds-behind-worlds, worlds enclosing one another and concealing one another." (says the art of happiness, 1923) // or, #selfportrait feat. morning-after-haircut, mysterious face rash (cont.), cardigan, sleeplessness

[poeticflummery]

NO MANIFESTO. // NO to spectacle. NO to virtuosity. NO to transformations and magic and make-believe. NO to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. NO to the heroic. NO to the anti-heroic. NO to trash imagery. NO to involvement of performer or spectator. NO to style. NO to camp. NO to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. NO to eccentricity. NO to moving or being moved.

[poeticflummery]

lungs, heart, (de) composition.

[poeticflummery]

second pair of lungs (and a heart).

[thingsorganizedneatly]

Beach rocks by Emily Blincoe

[retrogasm-deactivated20161109]

Klimt and muse Emilie Flöge

[thecommonmag]

AUTHOR’S NOTE

These “color swatch poems” are taken from a larger work in progress called Mutterfarbe, a book of experimental translations and poems using Goethe’s Theory of Colors as a primary source. Each of the colors and their names were pulled from the landscapes and built environments I inhabited during my travels throughout France in early 2015. The nine images at the top correspond with each color swatch poem, and represent those landscapes/built environs. The “Anhang” (appendix) at the end features lines I translated from Goethe’s text on color theory—each numbered line corresponding with one of the color swatches to create a new poetic text.

[thecommonmag]

Click here to read Brandi Katherine Herrera’s color swatch poems, dispatched to us from Normandy, France: “NATÜRLICHER / VIS-À-VIS LAND, ANIMAL.”

[lovelyarc-blog]

James Tate died today. I didn’t know him well, personally, but so many people I love very much did. Right now, the loss feels like a big hole, like time passing in that terrible way it does. His poems meant a lot to so many people, and they meant a lot to me. I can take solace in knowing they will always be there. With his life, he has done a very good thing. 

I taught myself how to read poems, write poems, and love poems, by reading James Tate’s poems. Nearly 20 years ago, he quickly became the poet who wrote the poems that vibrated at my frequency. 

Even this past week, I had the luxury of hearing him speak about poetry at the Juniper Institute. I wrote down a lot of what he said that day. I forget the questions exactly, but his answers were, “I know for certain that I don’t know,” and “I knew nothing,” and “I was amazed by my own naiveté,” and “I’m not a genius or anything,” and “You know, you don’t have to be a scholar,” and “I only had three keys, but there were 50 locked doors.” And of where his ideas for poems come from, he also said, “I was just trying to solve something that had been haunting me my whole life.” He continually reminds me, as I read him, and as I listened to him speak just last week, that poetry, for me, is a fun and necessary adventure.

I hope you’ll all re-read your favorite James Tate book this week. And if you’ve never read him, I hope you’ll read your first. You can start with this poem, from one of my favorite books, Memoir of the Hawk. It is the poem after which I named this blog, when I started it way back in 2003. Its last lines now shake me up even more today. 

THE LOVELY ARC OF A METEOR IN THE NIGHT SKY

At the party there were those sage souls who swam along the bottom like those huge white fish who live for hundreds of years but have no fun. They are nearly blind and need the cold. William was a stingray guarding his cave. Only those prepared for mortal battle came close to him. Closer to the surface the smaller fish played, swimming in mixed patterns only a god could decipher. They gossiped and fed and sparred and consumed, and some no doubt even spawned. It’s a life filled with agitation, thrills, melodrama and twittery, but too soon it’s over. And nothing’s revealed because it was never known.

[kevinsampsellcollages]

The Investigation Team 

(or Ride the Reading Rainbow)

[poeticflummery]

fiber art by mana morimoto. 

[poeticflummery]

morning, mar: stage one, mark-making, on a collaborative vis-po/marring project w/ zach and some lovely lady poets in PDX (conceived by miss lori anderson moseman of stockport flats). next: PAINT, flower, ash, etcetera. 

[mpdrolet]

New York Times, 1966

Gosta Peterson

[poeticflummery]

ready for this. now. 

[poeticflummery]

spectrum // think what you like about jodorowsky's the holy mountain, but i'll call this fantastic viewing session. 

[poeticflummery]

i translated the “blue” section of goethe’s theory of colors (zur farbenlehre), then made this little poem using only words i found there. this one’s called “black squirrel”.