monkey steals the peach

Nigredo.

"And from the relics of old mines
Derives his algebraic signs"

--W H Auden

good scop bad scop

eletrocuting viols pool us

virtuoso cogencies lull top

(from Carnival of Souls via bloggingby cinema-light)

Mars and Venus in the Koran.

young aryans in love

(via @itssylviaplath)

Trump triumphant.

"Cornell, who never felt at home in his own body or in his own house, makes his boxes as a nest for himself." --Gabriel Josipovici, Hotel Andromeda (2014)

Sanskrit loanwords in Indonesian.

"The idea of using a written apostrophe before the 's' to identify a genitive singular was not adopted until the seventeenth century, and the idea of using it after the 's' to identify a genitive plural was not adopted until the eighteenth century." --Culpepper, History of English

Mexican fuels.

your enslaving yon a
lousy ravening yon a
gravely noisy noun a
runny lion's voyage a
slung ivory anyone a
over us annoyingly a
snarling envoy you a
loony rev unsaying a
noisily nervy guano a
gunnery ivy saloon a
royal ninny's vogue a
ninny argosy ovule a
nosegay a runny viol
only a yang souvenir

Nor is it Written.

(via @SaladinAhmed)

before ploys

blind
surrounded by candles
sound of rain on the windshield
historic jellyfish

increases
decreases
rattles anew
strip of paler sky
at the horizon

red light on a tower

All about Boys for Pele.

my car silver gray
the color of this sky
tail lights glow
i am come

from the future you prevented

"Gossip, black rumors, subversions, insults, trolling, lies, deceits, cyberwar, rape allegations – even sabotage and leaks. These pollutants used to be filtered out of the public discourse by cautious media gatekeepers. Now they are weaponized."

a sticky croak

(pic by kathy robinson-hays)

Fake news sites.

"“It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” ―Cyril Connolly, 1949

"How is anything like governance or politics possible when there isn’t any shared reality?"

(via jessica eliassen on fb)

huaco silbador

(via @HarrySKeeler)

Grypsera.

"Ghosh attributes our current inability to see, represent, and understand environmental crisis to a probabilistic worldview that emerged in the 19th century and made no room for such 'uncanny' weather phenomena as freak tornadoes. Indeed, he argues that 'the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman' would only be tolerated in the realm of the supernatural, in the ghost stories of Charles Dickens or Henry James." --Stacey Balkan at Public Books blog, via aldaily

Hüzün redux. More.

"Just as no one knows the real nature of God but God himself, so no one knows the real nature of a prophet but a prophet." --al-Ghazzali, The Alchemy of Happiness (tr Murray, 1910)

"As the dream of becoming the world’s language becomes increasingly remote, many Esperantists are embracing the status of 'self-elected diasporic minority,' proclaiming themselves speakers of a language just as worthy and particular as any other..."

"One cannot emphasise enough just how crucial was the mass domestication of the car, ensuring the transition from what might be called 'traditional solidarities' to the unprecedented unleashing of modern individualism. What does it matter if the car kills, pollutes, and often makes people into total jerks, its proliferation destroying every urban space worthy of the name, when what is at stake is to ensure the domestication of gigantic human masses, the forging of thousands of psychologies of average men on wheels, 'highway mentalities', aping day and night the fluidities and competition of the Great market, etching it into the landscape ....?"

--Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs (via Spurious)

"The trajectory of Silliman’s blog is a cautionary tale for poets."

the secret life of poppies

(via time dot com)

Of Oz the Wizard. (via katexic)

"I am mad as a blizzard
I stare out of broken cupboards"

--Diane di Prima

We ivre tawny, innate tanniyn, Waterview.

(via gordon hilgers on fb)

Underwater Sun.

"In the thinking of the pious, the Floor of the Sea is a great, calm plain on which, in static promenade, the buried dead stand about in the blue shrouds of women and the red shrouds of men, their feet bound to their burial stones, contemplating for eternity the aqueous silence.
     Unable to bear such a prospect, the sailor has invented the lascivious Sea women, and the soldier has named our twin suns Sha'tule and the Sha'charn...'commander of the dead that arise as mists,' and 'commander of the dead that arise as storms.' " --Wyman Guin, "A Man of the Renaissance" in: Living Way Out (1967)

Recommended music for reading this article.

three exquinoxes

(another song in Ithkuil)

Eigengrau.

trabacolo

Singing with the longest echo in the world- Lucie Treacher from Lucie Treacher on Vimeo.

"Perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with Williamsburg: a cardboard cutout of a pair of sneakers hanging from a power line." --@BBolander via @tithenai

The only trabacolo still floating...

(via Dallas Poets Community on Facebook)

"In book after book (''Marks of Identity,'' ''Landscapes After the Battle'') Goytisolo has played with time and imagined a Europe that embraced rather than rejected its Muslim heritage."

    "Hours Gray
      by: Francis Vielé-Griffin (1864-1937)
        translated by Jethro Bithell

THOSE hours were good to us,
Like nuns with pity pale.
Sweet hours monotonous,
Drowning in mist, as does
A sister in her veil.

Those smiles that had not, after,
The writhen lip of gall,
Were they not worth our laughter?
Dear, worse hours can befall
Than those in foggy pall.

They went by sad and swathed,
As praying nuns do wind,
In gleams of opal bathed,
The gentle hours resigned.

Our souls are sisters still
Of hours of autumn gray.
Their gloaming brought no chill,
But blurred our follies, till
Our hearts were hid away."

Electronic Voice Phenomena.

(via) via @KameronHurley)

"To complete the proof, Mochizuki had invented a new branch of his discipline, one that is astonishingly abstract even by the standards of pure maths. 'Looking at it, you feel a bit like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space,' number theorist Jordan Ellenberg, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wrote on his blog a few days after the paper appeared.." (Thread.)

Lafferty synopses.

(still from I Know Where I'm Going via @GaryJKemp via @HarrySKeeler)

Attention must be paid.

"Joseph Conrad based his novel Nostromo on Cunninghame Graham's life..."

hwazaljg

(via)

"No one may be immersed in real jazz, and the blues, without a change in sensibility." --Walking in the Shade

Gigantic wearable felt cat heads.

"Mankind’s delusions so sacred under the sky
Shrink as they melt on the earth without honor.”

--Aeschylus via @sentantiq

After Vaporwave.

telephos

“Unthinking ιδιώται, unversed in their own emotions, not knowing that they love ruins, reveal it not in words, but by continually making more of them; more and more and more.” --Pleasure in Ruins

(pic by charley mitcherson on facebook)

White Rock Zine Machine.

"...Why does the air grow cold

in the region of mirrors? And who is this clown
doffing his mask at the masked threshold
to selfless raptures that are all his own?"

--Geoffrey Hill

(pic by jason cohen on facebook)

socket saturation

(via)

"Cassini"

we cry
for a season
which then will destroy
we cry
in the blithe bitter day
our home & our prison
we cry

for a season

(in Lojban:

MI'A KRIXA
CA LE CITSI
.IBABO SELSPO
.I KRIXA
CA LE SAMPU JE KURKI
DONRI
POI ZDANI JE SE RINJU
MI'A .I CITSI
KRIXA )

"Megapolisomancy is, in short, the art of seeing and changing the future by gaining an understanding of cities."

all ashgabat

         my newest longpoem "Ashgabat":

1, 2 | 3, 4 | 5, 6 | 7, 8 | 9, 10 | 11, 12 | 13, 14 | 15, 16 | 17, 18 | 19, 20 | 21, 22 | 23, 24

oannesburg

The Curve Paintings.

(by carla gannis via bruce sterling on ello)

The Visit, on vinyl.

"I had come to believe that a poet had something in common with the Japanese violin maker who worked for fifty years to create his delicate wooden instrument. When a buyer came into his store, fell in love with the instrument, and offered the violin maker more money than he had ever been offered, the violin maker smiled and said, 'This violin is for my great-grandchild; it can't be played for fifty years.' Perhaps the past had to settle for awhile before music could be made of it." --Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate (1997)

Resurrecting the Bouzingo.

" 'It bends my brain to know that, statistically speaking, it's harder to get a job at the Apple Store than it is to get into some Ivy League schools,' he says. 'Yet somehow they're staffed by some of the most inept people this side of mastering the ability to speak.' "

i can sell jugs

"There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light." --Patti Smith, M Train (2016)

Youme.

senbazuru

(Uruk, via)

"Every so often i returned to my Bolaño poem, still languishing between 96 and 104 lines. It became something of a hobby, a deeply wrenching one that produced no finished result. How much easier if i had simply assembled small airplane models, applying minute decals and touches of enamel paint." --M Train

Hyposubjects.

gharbzadegi

(by matty17art)

If the oceans were ink.

oodoolay mine

(Labassa, via)

Pandemonium solo.

perusive alias

(Aleppo today, via newsweek dot com)

Our two teams. One is playing with a real football, the other an imaginary.

XANRI NAJO FATCI BOLCI KELGRI REMEI

austere curriculum

(Silence has Settled by Nikolay Dubovskoy, 1890 via David Irvine on Fb)

English into Volapuk into English again. On the same page: "If Miss Dickinson had undergone the austere curriculum indicated, she would, I am sure, had become an admirable lyric poet of the second magnitude." (1892)

A special book.

"JW: What your 5 favorite “experimental” novels?

WG: Here are six experimental (by my definition) novels I think have outstanding literary value, but I am reverse-engineering the experiment.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’s Son: Write a collection of short stories in which the reader can neither prove nor disprove that the protagonists are all the same person. Extra credit if a reader unfamiliar with the book cannot figure out a thing about the author, even whether they are male (“Dennis”) or female (“Denise”).

Thomas Bernhard, Extinction: Write a novel in two halves, each one paragraph, in which the first half is all interior monologue with no action, and the second half is action, like a toy being wound way too tight and then let go. Extra credit for Nazi anxiety.

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch: Write a novel in which the chapters can be read in two different, explicitly stated orders, such that the ending is radically different each way. Extra credit if the writing is heartbreakingly lovely.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress: Write a novel in short, digressive paragraphs, that manages to avoid asking or answering the story’s silently screaming central questions. Extra credit if the book is infuriatingly unreadable the first time, and deliciously seductive by the third.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Write a novel in which the first-person narrator is the central character in the story, whose point of view the entire story is told from, but who somehow manages not to be the protagonist. Extra credit if this narrator, who writes beautifully, has no interest in writing.

Cormac McCarthy. Suttree. Write a difficult book that William Gillespie nevertheless reads five times, and cries each time from an emotion he can’t name." (via)

Yasusada--the movie.

"A novelist hears of a glass eye that can destroy all lizards, and dedicates her life to finding it." --@MagicRealismBot

Gillespie on Keeler.

"A forest in Tokyo is made of silence." --ibid

The sculpture of Shary Boyle.

"...in the age of the dying of the word compassion will pass as understanding." --Howard Jacobson, Zoo Time (2012)

Vesp.

(via @NASANewHorizons)

(blue image by alex schomburg via bruce sterling on ello)

astrobleme

(via planetary dot org)

"Monstrous child of the meeting of incompatible scales, queer progeny of impossible taxonomic breach, geophilia is the lithic in the creaturely and the lively in the stone."

"...whatever dark wet cellar-
hole we webbed up out of once..."

--Richard Kenney

Marcia Clark on the new OJ miniseries.

(via southerly journal)

The Seattle Archipelago. (via)

(Baikobur from the International Space Station, via darklyeuphoric on tumblr)

Gary Numan talks about Pledge.

owl fend askance

(vamana, via ancient ufo dot org)

"97. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,--
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few."

Emily Dickinson

MU'E FINTI LO SASFLO .IJO ZASTI
FA SU'O VOMEI
SE XRULA .E SU'O BIFCE

.E SU'O ZA'I SANJYSNE
.I RI BANZU VA'O LENU
BIFCYCAU

('The act-of-creating a grass-field if-&-only-if there exists/ at-least-one fourfold/ flowering-plant, at-least-one bee,// & at-least-one state-of conscious-dreaming./ The latter suffices under-the-conditions-of beelessness.')

"It's a curse, the writing impulse, if it gets you early, and if it doesn't get you early it isn't a writing impulse." --Howard Jacobson

NA BANLI VAMJI .I
KO’A GOI LE ROZGU
PENDO BE MI CUSKU
DI’E .ITU’E CERNI
JBENA .I LE CTEJAU
MI TOLDAPMA .I XULPRA
.I GLEKYCAI JE NELCI
.I SOLRI GUSNI .IBABO
TOLCITNO VI LE VANCI

.ISENI’INAI CA
ZE’UPU NA MELBYMAU
RULPURDI ZASTI TU’U

.I NA BANLI VAMJI .I
KO’A CUSKU DI’E
.ITU’E KO SISKU CO RINKA
LENU MI STEDU NITCARNA
.I SE’O CA’A FARLU
.I .IA FARLU .I CINMO
CO PAVYSEI .I BAZI
MROBI’O .I CO’A CLIVA
LE RULPURDI TU’U

NA BANLI VAMJI .I TO’U
KO’A CERNI MROBI’O
.I CARMI GUSNI LUNRA
.IJE MI CAPU SENVA
LEDU’U LEKO’A TRAJI
JE LUNBE PRUXYSE’I
RU’I DANSU GA’UVU
LEI DILNU GI’E CISMA

NI’O TI’E ZO’E
KRICI .INI’INAIBO
BA’E MI PACNA GI’A
NA SE CANLU .UOCAI

.I NA BANLI VAMJI .I
KO’A DI’U CUSKU

   My good friend the Rose

It’s little enough to win
And my good friend the Rose
This morning said to me
With sunrise I was born
To baptize in its tears
I followed into bloom
Knew joy & love’s delight
In the full rays of the sun
Then twilight made me close
At dusk my time was done

Awhile I was so fair
Among the rest most fair
Of those the garden grew

It’s little enough to win
And my good friend the Rose
This morning said to me
Go question for the cause
That I should hang my head
I feel that I shall fall
I fear that I shall fail
My heart is almost bare
I’ve one foot toward my doom
Already I am less

A day ago we loved
And I will taste its dust
Forevermore & soon

It’s little enough to win
And my good friend the Rose
This morning’s turned to black
The moon so bright reveals
My love in shroud I dreamed
I saw the Rose in bloom
Dazzling & alone
A spirit born to dance
Far above the clouds
And smiling smiling smiling

Let those believe who may
But I must dwell in hope
Without it I’m no more

It’s little enough to win
And my good friend the Rose
The day before had said...