Franz Wright has passed…just fuck. The reason I ever cared about poetry. ‘Entry In An Unknown Hand’ made me a poet. I’ll be in David Dodd Lee‘s debt forever for teaching Franz’s work. I was lucky enough to correspond with him occasionally over the past few years and he was always genuine, generous with his advice and time to a nobody writer like me.
Tag Archives: poetry
Later On (a Lorca ‘translation’)
Time, to be honest,
so much like crying
when the last hour comes,
inconsolable in its own silence.
So off with the boneclothes
surrounding the heart
with all its sickness.
Waiting for winds laden
with unpublished landscapes.
Bloom, bloom with running
and ineffable dresses,
other bones and other hearts
stacked broad with minutes
that were so honestly lost
behind, unheard when clattered.
Oceanfront winds and flotsam
dying to be eternal.
Kristen Eliason’s ‘Yours,’
Just a quick post to give whatever minor signal boost I can about this stunning chapbook. I had the pleasure of hearing Kristen Eliason read pieces from this series a few years ago at Notre Dame where she was the 2008 Sparks Fellowship winner. She’s a powerful reader and the poems are complete knockouts. It made me so happy to finally see them in print, and this chapbook from Dancing Girl Press is more than worth your dollars. Somber, quiet, introspective, heartbreaking, and very funny.
‘Yours,’ is available HERE
From ‘Entries of the Cell’, by Franz Wright
“…All will be
forgotten, everything you perceived, thought,
dreamed, hoped, remembered . . . all the past
all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding
nose-picking and deathward attempts
to make real some desperate desire, like
standing upright for a minute in the sun. The
sun that will die.
[…]
Let’s say that five a.m. arrives and finds you fully dressed in
yesterday’s clothes,
the clock set for six.
It’s bad, no question about it, and yet.”
I HAD A SCHEME (a Warren Ellis blog post erasure)
I dreamed a Medium
that was nothing but the
apocalyptic, numinous future.
A Black Mountain
of the new normal.
The space within I’m feeling
the year I was born, NEW WORLDS
that contained a black-on-black graphic:
WHAT IS THE EXACT NATURE OF THE CATASTROPHE?
The answer is half of my brain
in deep. I have APOCALYPTIC WITCHCRAFT.
The Hunt as cover.
(God, what if it’s just The New Hauntology? “We are as ghosts and might as well
get good at it.”)
I’m a little ghost rattling on The Archaic Revival.
Anyway. I woke up and still dream.
The Audience, Open (a Lorca ‘translation’)
Every morning, start with
a dead star in your mouth.
See the child in the mirror,
covered in rainbows of grey,
put behind him a nest
of summer silence.
Listen to him, his singing
of the night spring,
he reminds of its dew,
and so then the dead star,
its echoflesh mirage,
your day standing still with brightness.
Misc. Ratings
Books
‘You Can Make Anything Sad’, by Spencer Madsen — 4
‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami — 4
‘Walls’, by Andrew Duncan Worthington — 3
‘Even Though I Don’t Miss You’, by Chelsea Martin — 4
Film
Transformers: Age of Extinction — 0.5
V/H/S/2 — 1.5
TV
American Horror Story, season 2 — 4.5
Poetry is nothing and yes it matters
Today’s NYT Room for Debate asking, ‘Does Poetry Matter?’
Stolen from twitter, my only response to this is “Fuck off with this question already.” Poetry doesn’t quite ‘do’ anything, no art does, that’s its eternal power (and the source of all the eternal ‘criticism’ it and the other arts get); it won’t put food on your table (probably) or solve violence in the Middle East or really anything else. What it ‘does’ is help fill in the vacuum between all these things and make days filled with hunger and violence a little more worthwhile.
Film Poem: David Dodd Lee’s Ashbery erasure, ‘Friends’
Short film poem I did for one of David Dodd Lee’s Ashbery erasure poems, ‘Friends’. It’s a truly great piece (the poem). Kubrick I am not, but I enjoyed putting this together.
“But there is t…
“But there is this consolation:
If it turns out to not be worth doing, I haven’t done it;
If the sight appalls me, I have seen nothing;
If the victory is pyrrhic, I haven’t won it.”
John Ashbery
white walls / black ink 