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Search Results for: cold turkey press

Where Haughty Celia Sits

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This poem was spurred by email exchanges among Liliane Lijn, Gerard Bellaart, and myself. It takes phrases from them and from the three sources noted below. The impulse to compose it arose from this blogpost. MUSE In the sawdust heart of a puppet world, where haughty Celia ingloriously sits, her failed prophecy is buried by […]

Valedictory in a Taxi Cruising Slowly

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“Here are Sinclair’s ‘Last Words,’ written in Paris long before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory.” — HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS, from a tribute to Sinclair Beiles, in BONE HEBREW, a collection of Beiles’s writings published in 2013, in a limited edition, by Cold Turkey Press. Let me utter my […]

Two Ways of Looking at a Poem

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No shore receives them. / All the portents dog their ride. / Their bodies sink in rough seas. We surf on a gentle tide. / The shore awaits us. / No portents dog our ride.

Speaking of Hans Magnus Enzenberger . . .

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His poem “last will and testament”  begins: “get your flag out of my face, it tickles!” Jerome Rothenberg’s appealing translation from the German continues: and get that tinny wreath off my chest, it’s rattling too much; toss it over with the statues on the garbage heap, and give the ribbon to some biddies to doll […]

The Sorrows

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War is always a poison to the soul, even the most just wars. No more important victory was ever achieved than World War II, but America was poisoned, perhaps fatally, by the aftermath of its own success, because we never faced what war really is. It’s very difficult. There are no words for it. — […]

Speaking for Myself

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Death comes in all sizes / — sequoia, oak, and elm / maple, birch, fir, and pine, / elephants and whales / bumble bees and snails, / the Jews in the ovens, / Armenians slaughtered, / all the genocides before / and since. I am also dead . . .

Thinking of Auden . . .

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Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives. — W.H. Auden

Grub Street Deformation

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BEACHED On the sunny island of friendship ash was falling from our faces. “This is not subtle,” the doc said. He prescribed a regimen of pills the size of Montaigne’s chateau. My head shrank to a bungalow in Far Rockaway, and I recalled the ghost ship of our childhoods beached against the boardwalk where a […]

Screwed Beyond Repair?

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UNPATCHED for Simon Schama At the secular end of days when unconfined freedom means gusts of opportunity for all our computers to screw every one of us beyond repair, will the unspeakable terrors reappear? What tech service will patch our human flaws? Not the rolling disaster of holy water & passwords. Not infernal church bells […]

Is Dante for Our Time?

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‘Forget your hopes.’ (As quoted in a modern translation by Clive James) Traditionally: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Take your choice. One or both may help. For those with the ears and minds to hear them, the notes of pianos are full of ghosts. Each piano hammer and string is different, as is […]

Among the Laptoppers

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MORTAL COIL for Heathcote The coffee house loop that never ends sounds heavenly among the laptoppers. Failure is not an option. The fanfare of the horns and the swell of the hi-hat roll on like spooky dreams. Fingers dance — they fly like bats in a cave. The gods if there are any shall protect […]

‘Give Peace a Chance’

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here’s my attempt at images for oil transfer. wrote it on the full page ad in NYT, as you can see. Yoko Ono takes out the ad each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. first wrote it with the carbon paper layered underneath the paper i wrote on. didn’t work. so i then […]

Had the Algorithm Been Misplaced?

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Drawing by Gerard Bellaart The corpse blinked. Dead but alive dreaming awake. Had the algorithm been misplaced? Was it “life-in-death” within the winding sheet or “death-in-life”? Signaling the dreamer, the corpse winked but could not speak — or would not. I woke and no sleep came.

Caligula Gets Around

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A friend of mine, the author of four self-published books — one of which got 22 million YouTube views when a subversive porn star read from it on camera — occasionally prints bulletins in limited editions about whatever grabs his attention. Then he mails them to friends. The most recent, Bulletin #4, arrived at the […]

‘The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying’

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A reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford from a book of poetry published by New River Press. ‘I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.’ — Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Eugenia Hall ‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do […]

A Great One Died Today

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Updated with new information. ‘He was the Shelley of his age and more.’ — Gerard Bellaart A memorial service is to be held Friday (July 14), 3 p.m., at St. Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford. All welcome. July 17 — Malcolm Ritchie, whose friendship with Heathcote spanned decades, attended the service. This is his description: […]

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