Whale ace. Sneezers.

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DUCK LIST

American Black Duck, Black-bellied Whistling-Duck, Bufflehead, Canvasback, Comb Duck, Falcated Duck, Common Goldeneye, Daffy, Eurasian Wigeon, Ferruginous Duck, Fulvous Whistling-Duck, Harlequin Duck, Labrador Duck, Lesser Scaup, Long-tailed Duck, Manky Mallard, Masked Duck, Mottled Duck, Muscovy Duck, Redhead, Ring-necked Duck, Ruddy Duck, Spot-billed Duck, Tufted Duck, West Indian Whistling-Duck, White-faced Whistling-Duck, Abacot Ranger, Alabio Duck. Allier Duck (Blanc d'Allier), American Pekin Duck (also known as Long Island duck), Ancona duck, Australian Spotted, Aylesbury Duck, Bali duck, Barbary Duck, Black East Indian, Buff Orpington Duck, Chara Chamble, Challans, Cayuga Duck, Chara Chemballi Duck, Crested Duck, Danish Duck, Duclair, Dutch Hookbill (kromsnaveleend), East Indie Duck, Forest Duck (Eend van Vorst), French White Duck, German Pekin Duck, Gimbsheimer, Golden Cascade, Gressingham Duck (Wild Mallard crossed with Pekin), Huttengem Duck, Indian Runner Duck, Khaki Campbell, Magpie Duck, Majorcan Duck, Mulard, Muscovy Duck, Pekin Duck, Pomeranian Duck, Rouen Duck, Saxony Duck, Semois, Silver Appleyard Duck, Silver Bantam Duck, Termonde Duck, Venetian Duck, Welsh Harlequin Duck, Shetland duck, Swedish Blue duck, Swedish Yellow Duck, Wood Duck

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“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.” 

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Jonathan Williams • Portrait of Robert Duncan

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Francesca Lisette's What I Want: A Manifesto for Revolutionary Tenderness

I don’t think that poetry needs to do anything. I think that the poetry we have written, are writing, will write, is extraordinary and earthshaking and lifechanging as it is. TRULY. And I also think that our political lives need to continue to evolve, to be productive, to be active, and that is already revolutionary practice. I have come to believe that ‘revolutionary tenderness’ signifies ‘the negation of the negation’. That is, the refusal of the shittiness of our present moment and the determined insistence on optimism and in doing so, making the future life we want live in our present selves. I believe that unless we treat each other with tenderness and care now the revolution won’t come. 

[theparisreview]

“If you could see a movie of yourself you would realize that this is true. Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has been revealed, a surface on which a new phrase may be written before it rejoins history, or it may remain blank and do so anyway: it doesn’t matter because each thing is coming up in its time and receding into the past, and this is what we all expect and want.”

—John Ashbery, from “The System” Art Credit Gilbert & George.

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cover of John Ashbery's Three Poems (1972, Viking Press)

Look at that mustache!

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(Skanky Possum & Effing Press, 2009)

[poetryfoundation]

—Cid Corman, Poetry, December 1962

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Just now.

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"Karl Marx" — Charles Reznikoff

IV: Karl Marx We shall arise while the stars are still shining, while the street-lights burn brightly in the dawn, to begin the work we delight in, and no one shall tell us, Go, you must go now to the shop or office you work in to waste your life for your living. There shall be no more war, no more hatred;

none of us shall die of sickness; there shall be bread and no one hunger for bread—— and fruit better than any a wild tree grew. Wheels of steel and pistons of steel shall fetch us water and hew us wood; we shall call nothing mine——nothing for ourselves only. Proclaim to the seed of man throughout the length and breadth of the continents, From each according to his strength, to each according to his need.

(via)

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from Marx's THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY

"The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will." (cue Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm")

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[poetsorg]

Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns by Marianne Moore

with their respective lions— “mighty monoceroses with immeasured tayle—” these are those very animals described by the cartographers of 1539, defiantly revolving in such a way that the hard steel in the long keel of white exhibited in tumbling, disperses giant weeds and those sea snakes whose forms looped in the foam, “disquiet shippers.” Not ignorant of how a voyager obtained the horn of a sea unicorn to give to Queen Elizabeth who thought it worth a hundred thousand pounds, they persevere in swimming where they like, finding the place where lions live in herds, strewn on the beach like stones with lesser stones— and bears are white; discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires, and Sir John Hawkins’ Florida “abounding in land unicorns and lions, since where the one is, its arch enemy cannot be missing.” Thus personalities by nature much opposed, can be combined in concert such that when they do agree, their unanimity is great, “in politics, in trade, law, sport, religion, china collecting, tennis, and church going.” You have remarked this fourfold combination of strange animals, upon embroideries, enwrought with polished garlands of agreeing difference— thorns, “myrtle rods, and shafts of bay,” “cobwebs, and knotts, and mulberries” of lapis lazuli and pomegranate and malachite— britannia’s sea unicorn with its rebellious child now ostentatiously indigenous of the new English coast and its land lion oddly tolerant of those pacific counterparts to it, the water lions of the west. This is a strange fraternity—these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea-unicorns: the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador— the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity. A puzzle to the hunters, is this haughtiest of beasts, to be distinguished from those born without a horn, in use like St Jerome’s tame lion, as domestics, rebelling proudly at the dogs which are dismayed by the chain lightning playing at them from its horn— the dogs persistent in pursuit of it as if it could be caught, “deriving agreeable terror” from its “moonbeam throat” on fire like its white coat and unconsumed as if of salamander’s skin. So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear, yet never to be caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths, with which nothing can compare— this animal of that one horn throwing itself upon which headforemost from a cliff, it walks away unharmed; proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus, I have not seen except in pictures. Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness, has come to be unique, “impossible to take alive,” tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself— as curiously wild and gentle; “as straight and slender as the crest, or antlet of the one-beam’d beast,” Upon the printed page, also by word of mouth, we have a record of it all and how, unfearful of deceit, etched like an equine monster on an old cestial map, beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue, improved “all over slightly with snakes of Cenice gold, and silver, and some O’s,” the unicorn “with pavon high,” approached eagerly; until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy, upon the map, “upon her lap,” its “mild wild head doth lie.”

first printed in The Dial 77 (November 1924): 411-13. See pages 133-35

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My own sense of "reality," never perhaps all that strong, has changed over the years. I used to think that, the sum of things being obviously unreal, I should cling to what is at hand, the minute particulars of my immediate experience. I still try, but less and less seem particular. What I find now is more often like a play of light—that is, of shadow—in which the objects of my attention are ripples, or notches, or bumps, or bubbles, on a surface otherwise inarticulate, a field which, but for these defects, would be empty.

from Light While There is Light: An American History by Keith Waldrop | newly re-released from Dalkey Archive Press

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Like …Beat

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On February 12, 2013, I interviewed John Ashbery in his Chelsea (New York, NY) apartment, and moderated a discussion with people gathered at the Kelly Writers House, while many hundreds more watched via live webcast.