May 2012
23 posts
memorial day weekend
Too tired, too tired. Can’t deal with tourism, can’t deal with cameras, people walking too slowly, people with bad manners. When I stand on Liberty Island all I can think of is how much smaller the statue is than people make it out to be and how that place used to be something else completely, something that the tourists could care less about. All anyone ever cares about is taking...
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The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York
- Section 3, Of Being Numerous, George Oppen
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lonely short-liner
I — ( am so tired of “I”
what about ) — you
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late nights with Joan Didion and New York
”[…] quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet...
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built if from the ground up built it out of substance built it out of glass built it out of metal built it with precision built it with a clean precision something undoubtable something impenetrable something that felt safe I said: “I want to be fearless” I said: “I want to be bulletproof” I said: “I want to be a tour de force” “then come with...
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beginnings, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the...
Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. So long as I have questions to which there are...
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***
And only the sky arches the long train ride between sound and word.
- Matvei Yankelevich, from Alpha Donut
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Watch
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April 2012
12 posts
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"Rant," Diane di Prima / ("bring yr self home to...
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the...
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Houman Harouni on translating "Howl" into Farsi →
The first draft of my translation of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” into Farsi was written over three bed-ridden days in a village in India, in the summer of 2005. The date is important to this account for a few reasons — none of them entirely personal.
To begin, I was 23 at the time, younger than Ginsberg when he wrote the poem but in the same developmental ballpark. It also...
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One of those nights, which goes to say that it...
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from Reverend Billy, "Sad I Ran," October 29, 2009 →
I’m personally confused by what happens to us. We make a terrible agreement when we are in subways together, out in traffic or on bicycles, going to work, tending to our children. I try to catch the sales job as it hits us, but I miss it. Everyone in this city feels the sensation of the lie. It makes us world-weary and knowing — but we are dealt into a vast postcard called New York and...
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March 2012
7 posts
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“People of color, women, and gays—who now have greater access to the centers of...”
– Teju Cole, The Atlantic (via draupadi)
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February 2012
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WHAT IS A POEM?
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centered in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the...
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WatchLast Sunday, embarking on my 25th year, I walked through lower Manhattan where things were simultaneously silent and antiquated and overwhelmed by the sun. Liberty Plaza was empty, save a few of the crazies that had always been there and a handful of police officers with little to do, or at least that’s what it seemed. Not seeing anything to see, or at least for as far as I could see, I...
my feelings toward many things lately:
I’d like to laugh –– but mostly: I am too paranoid that someone will hear me.
January 2012
3 posts
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