| (no subject) |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|01:02 am] |
WHAT SHE WAS WEARING
by Denver Butson
this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I’m afraid
I might kill myself
if I don’t wear it
you’ve been wearing it
every day since we met
he said
and these are my arson gloves
so you don’t set fire to something?
he asked
exactly
and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots
I’d like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?
and today she said I’m wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don’t get any ideas
and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|10:01 pm] |
THE DEAD POET
by Lord Alfred Douglas
I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.
And then methought outside a fast-locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|01:18 am] |
MY LITTLE ONE
by Tennessee Williams
My little one whose tongue is dumb,
whose fingers cannot hold to things,
who is so mercilessly young,
he leaps upon the instant things,
I hold him not. Indeed, who could?
He runs into the burning wood.
Follow, follow if you can!
He will come out grown to a man
and not remember whom he kissed,
who caught him by the slender wrist
and bound him by a tender yoke
which, understanding not, he broke.
( moar moor more ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|07:33 pm] |
HER LONG ILLNESS
by Donald Hall
Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced; he worked
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
at the darkness blurred
with flakes. They pushed the IV pump
which she called Igor
slowly past the nurses' pods, as far
as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|01:59 pm] |
AN IMAGINATIVE STUDY IN DEGRADATION
by Olena Kalytiak Davis
This poem begins in this corner,
where barely awake and naked
I stand at the top of the stairs,
a bas-relief against a book-encased wall,
and watch you leave for the day.
You may ask: how does the nude
fit into the contemporary setting?
And Cézanne thought apples
were the most difficult fruit.
Remember the year I stopped eating apples?
Remember the summer I kept bringing home
abandoned chairs? A lucid Vincent wrote
to his brother: I have tried
to express the terrible passions
of humanity by means of red and green.
His self-portrait now hangs in the Fogg.
Remember the summer I had to walk
to the Lake just to feel anything at all?
When I descend late in the afternoon
there's a blue plate of heart-
shaped cookies, there's an orange
on the kitchen counter. I notice a crack
in the seam of the ceiling, a spider
vein on the inside of my knee.
What a still still life!
The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard.
The rest of the day is the color of absinthe.
Note the personal and detached attitude.
Note the application of arbitrary color.
The tilted perspective.
This poem is all surface.
You may stand where you choose.
This poem has no vanishing point. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2009|04:44 am] |
LIFE STORY
by Tennessee Williams
After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,
and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|09:57 pm] |
THE BLACK HEARSE
by Bill Graeser
would gladly
give its black away
for the yellow of the taxi,
the red of the fire-engine,
the ringing bell of the ice-cream truck.
And would be relieved to take
a load of lumber on its back
like the old Mack flatbed
or diesel of eighteen wheels.
But how then would the dead
get where they’re going—flowers
tender as hearts by their side?
No the hearse must be as it is—black
as the blackest fur of the blackest cat,
a car without a radio,
purposeful as a shovel
in the one thing it knows to do. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|10:13 pm] |
COASTAL PLAIN
by Kathryn Stripling Byer
The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,
the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak
limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind
stroking the flat
fields, the flat
swatch of corn.
Far as anyone’s eye can see, corn’s
dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky
or as water
that won’t remain water
for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer
of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield
to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots
and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night
soil of what we call
home. Home that calls
and calls
and calls.
putting these two together only because i wanted |
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| The Beautiful Nabokovs |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|02:11 am] |
Vladimir Nabokov as a young man
Dmitri with his father, an older Vladimir. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|11:16 pm] |
REGIME DE VIVRE
by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680)
I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap;
Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch growing bold, to my pocket does creep.
Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage.
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then crop-sick all morning I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|03:00 pm] |
THE LOVE COOK
by Ron Padgett
Let me cook you some dinner.
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it’s night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I’ve got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|12:43 am] |
One week ago, on a delicious spring evening, our ship was plowing ahead, I’m not sure how, on a windless day in calm seas. Someone proposed that we dance. So Beaumont went off to fetch his flute and a merry time was had by all, romping on the deck. If you want to know where this occurred, consult a map for the convergence of 42 degrees latitude and 34 degrees longitude! There, or thereabouts, was the dance hall. Man must be an animal heedless of all that may befall him to caper as we did over a bottomless abyss, under the vault of heaven, with death on all sides.
Tocqueville writing from the ship taking him to America when he was 25.
http://hudsonreview.com/new/issues/110/letters-from-america
“This trip was his great escape,” [Mr. Brown, one of Tocqueville's translators/biographers] said. “I think he felt imprisoned by his family and the past. He came from the ancien régime, from a royalist family, and the Revolution of 1830 more or less consigned his father to retirement. Alexis was a young lawyer and very much of two minds about the constitutional monarchy. He wanted to keep his job, and that required pledging loyalty to Louis-Philippe. On the other hand he felt like a traitor to his family. In America he imagined a world without that kind of conflict, without a past.”
Once he got here, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that physical space a sense of inner space and freedom.
“But what’s remarkable,” he went on, “is how open he was to everything. He wasn’t snobbish at all. All right, so Americans spit — it just didn’t bother him very much.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04alexis.html?_r=1
 |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|06:22 am] |
I haven't been able to find pieces by Kees van Dongen that I'm particularly drawn to other than the above Half-Nude Arab Boy which I LOVE. And, whatever, here's another nude leaning person painted by Schiele (of his sister).
And briefly in other news: I had NO IDEA about this:
In the last 70 days of his life, van Gogh painted 70 paintings, 68 of which are masterworks, arguably the longest run of brilliant painting in the history of art, after which he shot himself.
( more moar moor from the last 70 days ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|12:55 am] |
Vladimir Nabokov, of course, would...become one of the most important writers of the 20th century, earning not only critical acclaim but international fame and financial success as well. Sergei would never be famous -- in fact, his existence has been all but covered up by his family -- but in its own way his life would be just as remarkable. Shy, awkward and foppish, the opposite of his gregarious brother, Sergei had a secret: He was gay.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/05/17/nabokov/#story_full_c4087b954d318465c3524f8cf34f24e3
Around 1930 Sergei and his lover Hermann spent time at an 11th century castle called Schloss Weissenstein (belonging to Hermann's family) in the tiny Apline village of Matrei im Osttirol near Innsbruck, Austria. This, apparently, is what Schloss Weissenstein looks like today. I love the idea of these two men falling in love here. With the following quote of Sergei as the icon of their affection:
But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me.
Hermann and Sergei traveled about the capitals of Europe returning every time to the castle Weissenstein, where they walked and played tennis and bridge with Herman’s relatives. In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he said: “It's all such a strange story, sometimes even I don't understand how it happened ... I'm just suffocating with happiness... There are people, who would not understand this, to whom such things would be completely incomprehensible. They would rather see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end a deeply unhappy creature. There is talk about my 'reputation' and so on. But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me”.
http://www.geocities.com/larisabee/homoerotic_nab.doc
This happiness it seems had been until that point particularly rare for Sergei, who--in addition to being a stuttering effeminate boy unhappy in all childhood affairs--lived to grow up in the shadow of his older brother.
Meanwhile, the facts of Sergei's life are still obscure -- forgotten or concealed behind euphemisms or confined to the dusty realm of footnotes and archives.
It's a question worthy of a Nabokov novel: How could the lives of two brothers, both brilliant and talented, both rich and handsome, have led to two such different places: one to literary immortality, the other to the hell of a Nazi concentration camp?
--The Salon article [which is the most amazing article I've read in I-don't-know-how-long!]
It's interesting to read various accounts of who Sergei was. I like the letter written by Lucie Lion Nohl, a Russian imigri who knew the brothers at Oxford, quoted in the salon article:
Serge was the dandy, an aesthete and balletomane ... [He] was tall and very thin. He was very blond and his tow-colored hair usually fell in a lock over his left eye. He suffered from a serious speech impediment, a terrible stutter. Help would only confuse him, so one had to wait until he could say what was on his mind, and it was usually worth hearing ... He attended all the Diaghilev premieres wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.
And I LOVE that Sergei, Diaghilev and Nijinsky were, presumably, all in the same room at once, perhaps all enjoying the same thing for moments in a way that's easy to imagine being particularly unique.
My favorite detail YET!!!!!
Sergei was "the nicest of all the Nabokovs ... a sweet, funny man ... much nicer, much more dependable and much funnier than all the rest of them."
According to Ledkovsky, Sergei was deeply kind, "always a gentleman," devoted to music but also steeped in Russian, French and English poetry -- all languages that, along with German, he spoke fluently. "He could recite anything by heart, and when he recited poetry, he would not stutter at all."
-----------
POSTscript
Lev Grossman, author of the Salon article, found great fucking shit everywhere! Okay, here's what I'm talking about. Vladimir had a hell of a time reconciling himself to Sergei, generally, it seems, failingly. Okay, so Wood, presumably a biographer of Vladimir, we're told, has this to say about the homophobic brother of Sergei
"I think that Nabokov often tries to be inhumanly secure, and confident, and happy, and unregretful....If he pulled that off, he would be a monster. It's a fine thing to try -- and an even finer thing to fail." |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|02:35 am] |
My paternal grandmother would give this poem to my father a lot.
The other day, my father gave it to me.
INVICTUS
by
William Ernest Henley
OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|11:54 pm] |
SHOULDERS
by
Naomi Shihab Nye
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south:
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.
We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.
The road will only ever be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
( --------[3 more poems, just found her tonight, and am IN LOVE]-------- ) |
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