abcd efg hijk lmnop qrs tuv wxy &z ok ok

[tuvwxyandz]

Best Part of Elegy on Toy Piano

You fussed with the f-stop while rain made everything seem made of silver dots. best besides the cover, anyway

[heatherchristle]

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

(Since we arrived in Ohio I have understood time only in terms of rain.)

[tuvwxyandz]

I miss Ohio often - I miss Ohio rain

[tuvwxyandz]

Is it ever enough? I don’t know, how much is it? What is it I should do, in light of this new information? I've never figured out how to tell what I know I don’t and what I don’t know I don’t know. Given every story I’ve seen lately, I don’t give a shit what I do with myself; I want to know there's nothing I want and to never know what I don't yet know I could do to change everything.

[tuvwxyandz]

The Stone

Again the same arrogance: to chisel your life on another life, as if you wanted to withdraw your own figure from inside the stone, believing you had liberated it. --Titos Patrikios, September '69, trans. Christopher Bakken Some great images can become objects in themselves that function like a word defining a previously uncodified or unthought concept -- think Keats' urn or Frost's fence or a name written upon the strand. Philip Larkin's glass of water has become an important object in my life. I'd like to store Titos Patrikios' Stone in my brain for later use the same way. I'm obsessed with the notion we inscribe our minds and ourselves on the world as we see it.

[tuvwxyandz]

Swept Up Whole 

You aren't swept up whole, however it feels. You're atomized. The wind passes. You recongeal. It's a surprise.

-- Kay Ryan

After an initial infatuation with Kay Ryan waned, I'm reading "The Best of It" again. I've realized her colloquial, platitudinal diction and the fact she uses the same form in every poem does a good job covering up satisfyingly rough edges and wide-ranging, wildly-varying thought-patterns. She has an admirably large bag of tricks, actually.

She also has an ability to transform objects at intense speeds you barely notice:

Tune

Imagine a sea of ultramarine suspending a million jellyfish as soft as moons. Imagine the interlocking uninsistent tunes of drifting things. This is the deep machine that powers the lamps of dreams and accounts for their bluish tint. How can something so grand and serene vanish again and again without a hint?

-- Kay Ryan

[tuvwxyandz]

I BELIEVE IN ALL RHYTHM

It's hard to write in the face of everything, honestly. I'm happiest about my typeface, adjusting the background of my writing program to be dark with light text, I'm enjoying the process only marginally and the product barely ever, especially today.

My mind feels newly opened by Latour's object/thing distinction, and my teeth are ready to apply it to poetry, but my heart isn't in it (my mouth).

Writers, rest easy: everything is recorded! every one is recorded. Next decade's problem, the obvious question: where to keep the recordings. Do I want a specific debate, or a broad, ill-informed, unrealistic indictment? I'm not sure, and I, too, want to stop thinking about it. I want to cry, I hope I'm the only one crying over this or almost: I would still like to be a poet some day, maybe. I hope it's still here -- I'd have to write, I know. I'd have to change, "I have wasted my life" and don't know how to leave. If I leave, leave something again, will I lose everything? That certainly isn't poetry, and I feel further from understanding using that cliche. I want my own language back. That is, I want to look for it again.        But if it can't encompass this, I don't want it, and I won't want anything. I want to do something, but I want to make something.

I'm sick of not having anything. Have I ever loved poetry? I hate everything, sometimes. I'm sensing that feeling writing and thinking I started writing to continue thinking and feeling - so that's something.

Pick up speed. Scribble. Write essays - "to try," en francais. Re-write things that I like.