Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Victor Brown.... bookplate for Lily Yeats





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from Poems by WB Yeats, Cuala Press 1935


"There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree..."
wb yeats



Saturday, December 11, 2010

Suniti Namjoshi ....Building Babel..The Black Piglet





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from Building Babel by Suniti Namjoshi

Every retelling of a myth is a reworking of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a recreation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, becomes charged and recharged with meaning...



Suniti Namjoshi ...poem excerpts







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Theres sunshine in the garden
there are flowers in the hall
at your gate a lovesick beast
is breaking down the wall...
from poem ~ Courtship


Why did you make a hole in the sky,
Breaking the backdrop of placid blue days?
The black crow are flapping wildly in my head
While the blue air has closed about your absence.

from poem ~ In Three Tenses



Suniti Namjoshi




Monday, December 6, 2010

Secret Games.. the Prose and Art of J Karl Bogartte... part 1




The WONDERful prose of J K Bogartte...excerpts...

Secret Games is Book II in the ongoing series of prose poems exploring the sense of the marvelous mating of science and erotic metamorphosis as a form of landscape in which the real becomes imaginary, and forces itself into visible nature.....


In that place where life and death pass by unnoticed, the Messengers without their shadows light up the fabric of unauthorized expectations, like vague recollections of thoughts that were never yours, or another form of magic, or perfidious logic, when it multiplies your body out of the space that occupies your body, out of the circle of your ageless metamorphosis within a further space more paradoxical than the others, when you follow the births and funerals of a consciousness that resembles the sea, like a fire-propagating game of chance...

~~~

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The Paradoxical Game of Night
~~~

The pure fruit of an emergency landing, is a last ditch effort, a glowing hunger strung up by its ankles from the rafters, and impersonating the sputtering compass when it loses all sense of direction, kneels and licks your precious feet... then dashes off, exhilarated and beside itself. There is humor in the word: “precious.” The fruit is a night-light for the children who walk in their sleep––and therefore, the night is a narcissistic diversion... an act of irony that makes for intimate conversation between total strangers, when hidden meanings are always appreciated... when no one is present.



Reality is the amorous disruption of the wedding night, its fables and narratives in the black glass of the zookeepers’ promiscuous twin, the leopard’s robe of ingenious escapes, and the promenade of wonders...



Love is subversion of the senses, the negative light of magnetic sensations that cover you with the black dust of wings in the continuous vessel that reproduces your presence, and overflows. A singular plurality out of which are coaxed the drops of poison, of light, or words, a language of dew in the early morning, the dangerous clairvoyance of the body that swims in the bright water of its own two-way mirror. The psychosomatic eggs of an open window. Black honey, a pure black stone with a faithless heart of fire. Illusive and impeccable intervention.



 When the laws of nature intercede on her behalf, footprints are sent scurrying in every direction, and when the coordinates mimic the exact measurements needed to trigger the alchemical vessels that seduce the weather, that whir and hum like simian lanterns held up to warn of impending dangers and invisible locks, she enters the forest from behind, where the spirits speak only Spanish and the nights are without equal. It is necessary to harness these wonders. The minerals of distraction, molecules of light.



Her flesh of poppies reflects the sun while her shadow impersonates the moon. The history of perversions is the gold of science. She is an endlessly bathing light.



Amethyst of exchanging blood that ravages equality in the mother tongue, when the moon is a cat’s cradle in the sea of consciousness, of civil war in the telepathy of rebellious spirits, lovers in the fields of lunacy...



She was conscious of the purity of revenge, and he, the color of Central Asia at noon, always knew the mirror of her arousal. Together they avoided detection. Together, they were distant treasures.....


Art WORKS - photomorphoses




Saturday, November 20, 2010

Johannes Sadeler ...Bacchus, Amor & Music...1500's




Sadeler, Johannes bacchus amor music
click for larger image

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from Six Little Poems in Prose
by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Aleister Crowley



Saturday, October 30, 2010

Justin Lee Brown (Desiderata)... Of Dreams and Madness ...poem&drawing..




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Of Dreams and Madness


I am one stutter-step away from the rails, too late for a hail mary pass. I've become an intentionless phen-omega-non, tearing it up in a senseless dynamic, tearing it down in the mine fields of mutilated flesh where the bloody stumps of a futile resistance twitch out before the final paralysis. Flex paradoxical, just for the thrill of it. Pussy, pussy, run. Don't you see? In life birds fly where cats can't follow, towards a seemingly unfathomable destiny; climb towards ferocious heights where tender hope and unmolested sky momentarily erupt into the plausible. But not for me, the untouchable one.

In these final days of absurdity I AM the gravitational pull. I am the freedom that must extend, spiraling downward towards the rhizome, the mechanism of molecular, towards the intention itself in spite of all its pointlessness. I seek out the lowest level of libidinal energy rendered down to its quintessence, deconstructed and abstracted to the point of consummate alienation just to see it rise above terrestrial. I am the only conviction of my own contradictions, in the end the solitary breath that I draw from the collective will be drawn in the isolation of a solipsist consciousness. The journey of ages begins and ends with a solitary gasp.

It took me decades to find my voice, recognize it, flesh out my screams against impartial instruments and enigmatic signifiers, my ferocious investment only partially returned before I flipped the switch of void. Still alive and swollen with the genealogy of rage, I come to merge the violence of the self with the rogue cells of sadistic attraction. I AM blood. The native ancestry of a florid massacre. Against whom do we release our suicide? Who's skulls do we crush with rubric truncheons of dereliction? Step to the center and slide right. Five squares and three circles intersect at madness. The schism of imaginary presence augments a glistening archetypal voidness where the clatter of runes speak but leave no trace. I dissolve into this lush unified field of consciousness, an incandescent surreality of disaster, then cathexis, until I am a ruin of my own imagination. The aesthetic revenge of a simple madness comforts me as I descend.

Bathed in quiet rings of latern light, the figurative darkness of cognition divides me until I am scattered, only lonliness remains intact. Pushed along by cool atomic winds while pursued by consumptive assassins with cold enamel eyes, I sing ludicrous ballads while choking on shards of ivory bone. Three obsidian figures from childhood aberrations appear beyond the rumor of distant cries. Their starling smiles encode death and empty me of fractal infinites. Have you come here to dream code with me? How long will you stay before the Machinic explodes? Suddenly I am elsewhere in this discursive amalgam, sequencing dread through involuted time. Its symbolic order expressed through ripples of multilevel perception searing its way through waxy axon terminals, mindflesh, and the endless paroxysmal twitching of my eyeballs. I begin at last to see.

I AM become the manipulations of the paranoiac as I plunge through strata of cosmic drift. I float naked in its ether above Byzantine gardens, through a sudden burst of metallic rose petals quivering like dragonfly wings, float further down across pools of cobalt blue tipped with jade quantum foam. An ensemble of grey stone herrings suddenly take flight, flood my synapse with a cultivated integration of pain. The sound of wingbeats rushing around me, a soft static noise of cruel.

Voltaic penetration as an act of malice invades my dreaming with disquieting dialog of subatomic consciousness trapping me between layers of earth and stratosphere. The smell of seared flesh wraps around me to the point of suffocation. I struggle through emptiness, cryogenic tears pound like hail against my skull. Illumination and exposure bind me. Am I still dreaming? Who has come to judge my emptiness? I say, bring me the sweet enigmatic growl that I can adhere to. I much prefer the sun when obscured by cloud and your mouth when sewn tightly shut.

Justin Lee Brown /aka Desiderata

more poetry featured  in The Plebian Rag  & Clockwise Cat
previous post here

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven...poems...





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The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dec. 1915


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"Kindly" in a letter to Djuna Barnes undated



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"Ejaculation" undated

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -wiki

Baroness Elsa > more poems




Saturday, August 28, 2010

Maurice Scève (1501-c.1560)...Delie ...Emblems of Desire 1544



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Delie object de plus hault vertu was first published in 1544 in Lyon by Sulpice Sabon for the bookseller, Antoine Constantin. The subsequent 1564 edition, published in Lyon by Nicolas Du Chemin, follows the first edition closely, but moves the initial huitain (“A SA DELIE”) to the very end of the volume and includes an index of figures and first lines. The woodcut figures present significant changes from one edition to the other. The Délie has a mathematical layout; many suggestions have been made about its significance and about the relationship between text and image inasmuch as this work has a visual and spatial component. The Délie is composed of one decasyllabic huitain (an epigram of eight lines of verse), 449 decasyllabic dizains (epigrams of ten lines of verse), fifty woodcut emblems (each with a motto and a figure, surrounded by an ornamental border) which appear at regular intervals.



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Paris : Nicolas du Chemin, 1564.

Scève’s Délie is a syncretic work, which bears the mark of the poet’s erudition and high concept of poetry. The work conveys the thoughts and feelings of a lover suffering from unrequited love and striving for perfection. Throughout the Délie, love is an obsessive and complex experience in which the sacred and the profane are intertwined. The question of Délie’s identity has tantalized critics; some have assimilated her to the Lyonnese poet Pernette Du Guillet, whose posthumous Rymes sometimes echo Scève’s Délie. La Croix du Maine, in contrast, saw the name “Délie” as the anagram of “L’Idée” (Idea), and stressed the Neo-platonic aspects of the lover’s quest. Yet, Délie eludes any attempt to define her; her composite persona combines references to Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and Petrarchan poetry, the Bible and Christian literature, classical texts and iconography, mythology, French and Neo-Latin sources. The concise quality of the dizains, and their convoluted syntax contribute to the complexity of this fascinating work.


from the Gordon Collection at the University of Virginia


* * *

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43

The less i see her, the more i hate her:
The more i hate her, the less anger i feel.
The more i adore her, the less it means:
The more i flee her, the more i wish her near.
Love with hate & pleasure with pain,
The two arrows fall on me in a single rain.
And the love i great which thereby gains
As hate sinks in & cries out for revenge:
Thus my vain desire makes me detest
The one my heart so infallibly requests.


* * *


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163

For this kindness let me at least commend you,
Of which i note both occasion & site
Where, all atremble, you heard me undo
This mortal knot into which my heart was tied.
I saw you, like me, now grown tired
Of my travail, more out of compassion
Than any sense of this great passion
I still feel, though less so than at the start.
For as you extinguished my affliction,
You secured this burnt offering of my heart.

* * *




Wednesday, July 21, 2010

A Season in Hell...Arthur Rimbaud & Robert Mapplethorpe




 ....
A Rimbaud
A SEASON IN HELL [Une Saison en Enfer] (1873)
SECOND DELIRIUM: THE ALCHEMY OF THE WORD

I only find within my bones
A taste for eating earth and stones.
When I feed, I feed on air,
Rocks and coals and iron ore.

My hunger, turn. Hunger, feed:
A field of bran.
Gather as you can the bright
Poison weed.

Eat the rocks a beggar breaks,
The stones of ancient churches' walls,
Pebbles, children of the flood,
Loaves left lying in the mud.

* * *

Beneath the bush a wolf will howl,
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, I devour myself.

Waiting to be gathered
Fruits and grasses spend their hours;
The spider spinning in the hedge
Eats only flowers.

Let me sleep! Let me boil
On the altars of Solomon;
Let me soak the rusty soil
And flow into Kendron.



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It is recovered.
What? - Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.

You must set yourself free
From the striving of Man
And the applause of the World
You must fly as you can...

- No hope forever
No orietur.
Science and patience,
The torment is sure.

The fire within you,
Soft silken embers,
Is our whole duty
But no one remembers.

It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.

from LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB- A. RIMBAUD & R. Maplethorpe A Season in Hell. 1986






Monday, July 19, 2010

Abdellatif Laâbi... poetry



Abdellatif Laâbi: from Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis
Translation from French by Gordon Hadfield & Nancy Hadfield

FRAGMENT 1

In the beginning was the cry
and already discord

Which tore
the marriage of fire

Confused
violation
sordid struggles of separation
and staggering blows of solitude

Sky drew back from fire
water drew back from sky
earth drew back from water
idea drew back from clay
and the form surged
cut in two

One half was retained
the other thrown in the abyss

No one thought of good
or evil

Who could have done otherwise?

It was necessary to pile
embers against embers
to awaken this unshakeable
fire in the eyes

The prey softens and submits
offers its hairy neck
to the belly’s
voracious germination

Everything devours everything
each cunningly takes its turn
the gluttonous sounds of swallowing

Vast was the destruction

The tadpole
in its stagnant pool
could not fathom

If only he had an antenna
with a small lens attached to the end
he could have …
But what would that accomplish?

Destruction
sole witness to destruction


With this indictment the water returns
cloaking the unsavory spectacle


Amplifying the disorder

These purposeless waves

For a lapse in eternity
there was nothing but waves

A wineskin
its contents shaken
as if something begrudged its roots

With somber jaws
the waves cut to the quick
stifling these stammers
mixing and remixing

For which fleeting idea did they seek revenge?

The waves mixed primal decline
excess of matter
meagerness of memory

This upheaval spawns Hybrid
arch menace
cauldron of pure insanity

Hybrid frolicked
proliferated
color is invented
by a simple rustle of light
free from its form
the gaze rises from the offal
mouths adorned
by either a retractable vulva
or an edible penis
Organs mirthfully
exchanged
One even hears snatches
of clear music

Being sculpts Being

Limbless life
examines itself

Like a vital flowering
with a sprig of intelligence
and immediate love

There were only dreaming leaps
in the dance of origins

Body of all bodies
Hybrid
the possible denying the impossible
progress from the horizon to the whole
genesis in love with genesis


But a darkening
from flashes of rage
and a flood of meteorites
What endures great trials
will last
Then the waves ebbed
abandoning the earth
that overturned cauldron
with its bloodless population

Why this confusion?



from the wonderful collection at >

POEMS AND POETICS

 




Sunday, April 25, 2010

Alan Sillitoe...Poem


Alan Sillitoe, 4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010.

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Hannes Bok


sonnet: love


Love is not to be sought and known
When a mere comet-flash means dark
Oncoming doom. Who seek Love stand alone--
(Do not dream what visitations mark
The final pain of procreative world,
What blood-bellied moons of solstice red
Shine at myrtle-berried midnight)--are killed
In stone-cold bodies never brought to bed.


Love is antique, no fickle mind
Can satisfy it; and never Hope will gain
An entrance to loins that like a wind
Spin a black night into a wheel of pain:
Not to know, and a tiger's black and gold,
Can the vast orbit of Love's pleasure hold. 



Wednesday, March 17, 2010

William Butler Yeats ...Magic and poetry...Happy St Patricks...





magick note book - yeats





georgie & jack yeats

In 1892, he wrote: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."




















I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the
depth of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I belive in three doctrines,
which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundation of nearly all magical practices. These doctrine are:

1 - That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
2 - That the borders of our memories are shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
3 - That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

1908

¤ A Crazed Girl ¤


That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'



William Butler Yeats

Monday, January 25, 2010

may butterflies rise from yr grave every year..for Garcia Lorca...Rob Plath..poem





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Louis le Brocquy - Lorca


may butterflies rise from yr grave every year..


by Rob Plath


a soldier pumped
two bullets
into yr buttocks
for being a queer

then another
into the branches
of yr lung
for being
a poet

another word
for dirty communist
to them

you were their worst enemy
w/unplugged asshole
& wide open singing
lung bags

i imagine yr
assassin bragging
about it afterwards
to his comrades

then later that night
giving his wife a good
hetero fascist fuck

his dick standing like
a middle finger
to commie faggot poets
his torso full of
fearful gears
moving w/precision
over her body

his clenched homophobic
cheeks thrusting
like a pair of iron fists
bloodless knuckles

giving it to her once
for himself
& once for the gang

the regime


Thursday, January 21, 2010

Leonor Fini... Sphinx & Charles Baudelaire...Beauty..poem and drawings...




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Beauty



I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.


On a throne in the sky, a mysterious sphinx,
I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate movement for it displaces lines,
And never do I weep and never do I laugh.


Poets, before my grandiose poses,
Which I seem to assume from the proudest statues,
Will consume their lives in austere study;


For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!




Charles Baudelaire - The Flowers of Evil
Translation by William Aggeler

Monday, January 4, 2010

Andrey Bely... poem and drawing...




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VERTIGO

Now I have wandered long years and many,
Have drowned in the haze of the late afternoon
Until my poor feet are bleeding and heavy,
They must give out soon.

As I lounge in the fumes of the charcoal vapors
Questions pop out, like an unpaid debt,
And someone offers- in a tasty little packet -
A cigarette.

And then when I sit with elbows on the table,
Swoonin with awe, merged fearfully
With things not of earth, somebody says
"Here's your tea."

Oh, I am a child of the flame, of the glory,
Visions shine before me all through the night,
But can it be- can it be possible
They will not even know me by sight?




Monday, December 21, 2009

Aleksander Blok... poem..



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"Snow Wine"


Again, from the goblet, your presence
sparkling fills my heart with care--
you with your smiling innocence
and your serpentine waves of hair.

Swept off my feet in the dark stream
I again live through
a passionate forgotten dream
of kisses, of snowstorms masking you.

Your laugh your magical laughter
and in the golden goblet sway,
and lightly over your sable hair
the current of the blue wind play.

And how, looking into the liquor,
could I miss my Bacchic wreath?
and fail to remember your kisses
my face upturned to meet mouth your mouth?


29 December 1906


Wednesday, November 4, 2009

RIP Alda Merini...



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Winged woman, stop your rancor:
the life that you bear of mystery
smells bad above the cushion
and moribund passes away.
Just so every proud tree oozes
love, behind your dark manures
that you spread of seed and of lust,
and pays at least for the seduction
of violated souls. Even so cantata
of the devil, you are an enemy of God
and then sullenly your lust
coagulates over the souls of heroes,
and you are young. You harm
all who see the path
of your peace and no one penalizes
you for the altar of your greatness
which makes offers to gods. As if you
were a goddess dressed in lust,
you call the gold into your arms
as I call the sons of the night.


¤¤¤


I do not need money.

I have need of feelings
of words, words chosen wisely
of flowers called thoughts,
of roses called presences
of dreams inhabiting the trees,
of songs that make statues dance,
of stars that murmur to the ear of lovers.
I need poetry
this spell which burns the weight of words
that arouses emotions and gives new colors.

Love do not damn me to my fate
Hold me open all the seasons
let my great and warm decline
not fall asleep along drives
put in passive all the passions
sleep on the pillow tenderly
where grow provident ambitions
of love and universal passion
take my everything and do not hurt me.
Alda Merini



Friday, October 30, 2009

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...




Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.
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Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov




~Poems~


Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!




The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful....



edward estlin cummings
(October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962)



"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."




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self-portrait ee cummings



i am so glad and very

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i





i have found what you are like



i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss






2 little whos

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)




Thursday, October 1, 2009

*Guest Blog...



Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O'Sullivan was born in Lincolnshire to Irish parents. Poet, artist, editor, publisher, she has performed and published her work since the late 1970s.


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Arshile Gorky, "Study for "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia"

"Elegy" (after Arshile Gorky)

You measured things by weight.
You loved the feel & shape of apricots
the wave & sway of fields of grain
the strength & pressure of waterfalls
the flow & shimmer of rivers
the luxuriance of orange, amber & terracotta
on naked paper
the drift & wing, flutter & rustle
of birds & leaves.
You loved the surreal
the song
the edible
and, above all,
bread.

Your palette unfurls a flirtation
of glow & shadow,
a tenderness of breasts,
a poignant sweet incense of lemons
figs olives honey &
cherry trees in blossom.
The sanctuary holds all.
The bitter-red roses,
the scarlet-red crest of the cock,
the shivering silver sickness of poplar leaves
and the pallid hands, distorted, flat
as icons. [...]


Malevich

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Malevich, "White on White" (1918)


white on white

white square on white ground
white ground on white square
groundlight on white
white on light

white nothing
nothing within nothing
within nothing nakendess
white nothing
naked

nothing revealing
nothing reveals nothing
yielding nothing
nothing yields nothing

* with many thanks to R O'B