Mine have never been finished either. And so . . . an updated, revised, redesigned, and expanded collection in both hardcover and paperback editions is out now, with a new title: “All That Would Ever After Not Be Said.”
Search Results for: cold turkey press
Paul Valéry Reminds Us
The Uninhibited Bite of Dutch Mordant
With an artist as prolific and versatile as Gerard Bellaart, it is not easy to pinpoint his “style.” His paintings bring a dream world out of hiding. His drawings look spontaneous. But you can be sure they are supported by years of deep training. You can also be sure they are not “easy” viewing.
Making a Chapbook of Poems and Drawings
A high-speed look at the dummy shows the pages in sequence. See the spreads on Barcham Green paper ready for sewn binding.
‘He had no special powers, nor was he brave …’
“‘Acadian Elegies’ is a series of 24 texts that appropriate sentences from hundreds of obituaries. The source texts have not been altered except to remove proper names Their particular facts are employed to tell stories about no one in particular …” — Emile LeBrun
John Butler Yeats’s Sublime Ignorance
‘I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance—it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with my ignorance as my betters are with their knowledge …’ — John Butler Yeats in a letter to his son William Butler Yeats
Once When High on Hash (Two Versions)
Baudelaire drew his self-portrait under the influence of hashish (ca. 1842). As for me, ‘I wore no topcoat … / and no comet struck / me from a morbid sky … ‘
Samuel Beckett: ‘Spring’
‘The strange, gentle pleasures I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me.’ — Samuel Beckett
Becoming ‘Nobody’
“This seems about right at any time but especially in the time of #MeToo.” — Yakov Boyarsky
This Blogger Needs to Take a Break
We weep
to leave behind
the sun
lightly pencilled in,
nothing left of the eternal. …
We are still
only small animals.
The Way the Lines Break
FOR THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
This is what is——the serenity of now
suspended like cumulus clouds, the night
freshened with rain and shafts of white
moonlight so bright I can read you
by the window. This is the tide hidden
from the volcano’s molten flux.
Speaking of Translation
“My texts belong to the world / Even when they are forged copies / My translators complain of climbing steps to attics / They complain of sifting through the debris in basements / They complain over the endless boxes stored / In countries that don’t even allow them entry / A watchdog guards a box somewhere in Moscow / An irate lover protects another box / My translators complain of bad backs and dust / One translator complained because of the food …” —William ‘Cody’ Maher
Borges: ‘To Whoever Is Reading Me’
You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? [. . .]
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.
Borges: ‘The Thing I Am’
‘I have forgotten my name. I am not Borges
(Borges died at La Verde, under fire)
Nor am I Acevedo, dreaming of battle . . .
Just an Arbitrary Notion
for a useful meaning
no starched collar
inked his lines
nor the uptight
narrowness
of the familiar
bank clerk
A Poem and Its Genesis: Malcolm Ritchie’s ‘Writing It’
… and my hand held up against the sky / as if a naked bird singing in sign language / to an empty page lying somewhere / in an uninhabited house where / only dust is moving / from room to room … — from “Writing It”
Alchemical Poetry
LET US WRITE poems easy to read / simple to understand— / not the kind of thing / that Donne or Milton / wrote, nor the Bard’s / still greater brand, / the kind of thing / we make for children / who don’t know how / to read, for grownups / who forgot or never / learned to understand— / for the dead, perhaps, / to hear the damned.
‘Gently, Gently, Stronger, Harder, Deeper’
UPDATE: Jan. 23 — “Le Regard d’Autrui” may now be purchased in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Spain. CARL WEISSNER (1940-2012) was the preeminent German translator of dissident writers such as Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, and Nelson Algren, having published […]