Ponder fall

Libra Horoscope for week of 8/25/10

The odometer will turn over soon, metaphorically speaking. The big supply of the stuff you stocked up on a while back is about to run out. The lessons you began studying a year ago have been completed, at least for now, and you're not yet ready for the next round of teachings. These are just some of the indicators that suggest you should set aside time for reflection and evaluation. The world may come pounding at your door, demanding that you make a dramatic declaration or take decisive action, but in my opinion you should stall. You need to steep in this pregnant pause.

Two

years ago today. My father. RIP old man!

atmospheric

From Fragments of a Broken Poetics

by Jennifer Moxley

VII

What does it matter if there are poets or poems?

XI

In poetry, as elsewhere, nature isn't what it used to be.

XII

The poem resists. It resists coming into being. It resists eloquence.

It resists transmitting unpleasant or embarrassing knowledge.

It resists grammatical constraints. It resists moving away from simple utterance.

It resists revision. It resists completion. It resists success. Hopefully, the poet resists as well.

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

XLII

It seems as if the able use of metaphor has precipitously fallen off since doubt was cast upon language's ability to represent the real, and yet simile, a far less interesting trope, somehow continues to thrive.

VIII

The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals.

XV

The poet must understand seduction, because even capricious human attention is susceptible to courtship.

news

I received some good news recently.

(but never know quite how to go about

"sharing" in here. Write it/duh.)

I was selected to be one of three inaugural

fellows at the new Purchase College Writers Center

this coming fall.

I'm amazed and pleased and surprised

and have already reorganized my summer reading.

Soon a new notebook. Maybe a new pen!

I have a manuscript that needs serious fixing.

And a new project/book/something underway.

I get some space and time and, most wonderfully, a research library.

This all makes me very happy.

Fire

by Anthony Discenza

sale today. Enough with all

this talk about words.

tropical

Bluet or cornflower or centaurea cyanus

nevermind it's the color oh and the heat again.

How could all the shreds of garbage bags stuck

in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping

over every shanty and fish stand in the world,

be, in essence, the fingerprints of God?

Maggie Nelson, BLUETS

frida

It's hot here-a heat weave,

I keep writing.

And it's Frida Kahlo's birthday.

In her honor this door and her words.

I would like to be able to do whatever I want behind

the curtain of "madness." In this way, I would arrange

flowers, all day, I would paint pain, love, tenderness,

I would freely laugh at others, but above everything

I would laugh at myself. I would build my world

that would be mine and theirs as long as I live.

beach

EXPLANATION

by Josh Kalscheur

It will take a good fight to bring her back
and the chief there orders his men to call
her in with conch shells, even if it means love

or staying on the beach when the sand hardens.
There’s the chance she’ll float like Olofat
who spat blood and broke himself

into an archipelago. There’s the chance
she drank the sweet water in Tol
and poured her body out as a spring.

There’s the half-caste joke about the men
who left the lighthouse years ago.
No one can discuss sunsets or the fiberglass

of the boat or the story about her breasts
bloating later in the shape of an island,
into real rock. A bulletin goes out

and the boys climb trees for signals.
It could be days she stays huddled there,
and the oddsmakers on Saipan

place their faith in the fish she might spear.
Big deal some say, remember when the cliff
had imprints of hands, and the sliding streaks

of Sudal. There’s the chance she’s stuck
in a tunnel of coral or torn to tufts
and in that case the son could start killing

the pigs. She left the Mortlocks at night
and now the women cover the fences
with fronds and start with the baskets.

There’s the hope she’ll drift again as scraps
of land, as the upper half of a woman’s body,
the curve of sand in her neck.

Thanks to Matt Nienow for finding this poem.

I was at the beach today. I'm still here I think. Or there.

some poems

Up at BigCityLit

Photos from the exhibition at the NY

Botanical Garden on Emily Dickinson's

garden. I read some of her poems there Saturday.

Poems on death, bees and roses, my favorite topics.

bad

writing: the documentary