Ekphora

2012-03-06T19:04:00.000-08:00

2012-03-06T17:28:00.000-08:00

There is a pain--so utter--
It swallows substance up--
Then covers the Abyss with Trance--
So Memory can step
Around--across--upon it--
As one within a Swoon--
Goes safely--where an open eye--
Would drop Him--Bone by Bone.

— Emily Dickinson

2012-03-06T17:20:00.001-08:00

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

— Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia"

2012-03-03T21:06:00.000-08:00

Lyonel Feininger

2012-03-03T21:05:00.001-08:00

I agree to this landscape
which does not exist.

The father is holding a violin.
Children are licking at the sound.

A draft
brushes the rose petals.

Then the war. We lose sight of one another.
Huddled in full sentences, words are in hiding.

An empty room
parked in the twilight
of an old apartment house.

Please leave a message,
says no one.

— Ewa Lipska, "No One" (translated by Robin Davidson and Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska)

2012-03-03T20:59:00.003-08:00

I dug a grave under an oak-tree.
With infinite care, I stamped my spade
Into the heavy grass.
The sod sucked it,
And I drew it out with effort,
Watching the steel run liquid in the moonlight
As it became clear.
I stooped, and dug, and never turned,
For behind me,
On the dried leaves,
My own face lay like a white pebble,
Waiting.

— Amy Lowell, from "Dreams in War Time"

2012-03-03T20:57:00.000-08:00

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

— Vera Pavlova, "If There is Something to Desire"

2012-02-28T19:59:00.000-08:00

The razor across the eyeball
is a detail from an old film.
It is also a truth.
Witness is what you must bear.

— Margaret Atwood, from "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written"

Image: film still from Un Chien Andalou (1929), directed by Luis Buñuel

2012-02-21T21:49:00.002-08:00

And now
I want to be left
without words. To know how to lose
what is being lost.

— Mirta Rosenberg, from "Portrait Ended" (translated by Julie Wark)

2012-02-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

Vivian Maier

2012-02-21T21:17:00.002-08:00

It happens that one pronounces
a few words just for oneself
alone on this strange earth
then the small white flower
the pebble like all those that went before
the sprig of stubble
find themselves re-united
at the foot of the gate
which one opens slowly
to enter the house of clay
while chairs, table, cupboard,
blaze in a sun of glory.

— Jean Follain, "Speech Alone" (translated by W.S. Merwin)

2012-02-21T21:16:00.000-08:00

Overhead the geese are a line,
a moving scar. Wavering
like a strand of pollen on the surface of a pond.
Like them, we carry each year in our bodies.
Our blood is time.

— Anne Michaels, from "Miner's Pond"

2012-02-21T21:15:00.000-08:00

This summer which
only consisted of your
absence -

I felt you everywhere
even in the fur
of a cat that had strayed far from home
even in the draught coming from
the metro shaft

All those endearments,
embraces between us -

I'll never be able
to make you feel them.

— Ludwig Steinherr, "Letter" (translated by Richard Dove)

2012-02-14T15:06:00.001-08:00

On that summer night, said Austerlitz, we sat high above the estuary of the Mawddach in our hollow in the hills until daybreak, watching the moths fly to us, perhaps some ten thousand of them by Alphonso's estimate. The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them.

— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (translated from the German by Anthea Bell)

2012-02-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

Un Chien Andalou (1929), directed by Luis Buñuel

2012-02-13T18:26:00.001-08:00

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

— Walter Benjamin, from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

2012-02-10T18:24:00.001-08:00

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

— Patrick Dubost, "What I Know" (translated by Fiona Sampson)

2012-02-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

Eugène Atget, Saint-Cloud, France, 1923-24

2012-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Franz Kafka, from The Blue Octavo Notebooks

2012-02-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

ink of eyes and veins and phonemes
the ink completes the feeling

a mirror silently facing a door
door with no lock no lock

the room he brings into you
the room befalls you

like the fir trees he trues her
she nears him like the firs

if one vanishes one stays
if one stays the other will or will not vanish

otherwise my beautiful green fly
otherwise not a leaf stirs

C.D. Wright, from "Floating Trees"

2012-02-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

André Kertész, Washington Square, Winter, 1954

2012-02-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

From the grey sky that lowered over the city outside a few isolated snowflakes were floating down, and disappeared into the dark chasms of the yards behind the buildings. I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains, the complete absence of sound, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the whole village and the valley all the way to the mountain peaks, and how I used to imagine what it would be like when we thawed out again and emerged from the ice in spring.

— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (translated from the German by Anthea Bell)

2012-02-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

Yves Klein, Making of Fire Paintings at the testing plant of Gaz de France, La Plaine Saint-Denis, 1961

2012-02-04T22:01:00.001-08:00

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

— Mary Oliver, from "The Ponds"

2012-02-04T21:56:00.001-08:00

I thought I was growing wings --
it was a cocoon.

I thought, now is the time to step
into the fire --
it was deep water.

Eschatology is a word I learned
as a child: the study of Last Things;

facing my mirror -- no longer young,
the news -- always of death,
the dogs -- rising from sleep and clamoring
and howling, howling,

nevertheless
I see for a moment
that's not it: it is
the First Things.

Word after word
floats through the glass.
Towards me.

— Denise Levertov, "Seeing For a Moment"

2012-02-04T21:35:00.001-08:00

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise...

— Sylvia Plath, from "Fever 103°"

2012-02-04T00:25:00.001-08:00

Desiree Dolron

2012-02-04T00:07:00.000-08:00

Ruin is a promise
we make to each other.

— Katie Ford, from "Beirut"

2012-02-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians

When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.

When you father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn't.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.

— Diana Der-Hovanessian, "Shifting the Sun"

2012-02-03T21:10:00.000-08:00

André Kertész, Bocskay Tér, Budapest, 1914

2012-02-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in the mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (translated from the German by Anthea Bell)

2012-02-02T21:22:00.001-08:00

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in--
all in comes the fury of love.

— Anne Sexton, from "The Big Heart"

2012-02-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

Ekaterina Grigorieva

2012-02-01T21:27:00.001-08:00

I have no need for words.
The sleet on the windows,
the slow breathing of you sleeping,
the clock's hum—
our home's soft conversation.
No moon, but the clouds hold all that snow,
night softened to gray; no words can lighten
a sky like that, ease the push and pull that
holds us tight. What is it we won't say?

Under the streetlight a rabbit shivers along
fence posts, shadows long as wet pines,
chicken wire clotted with drifts.
The heaviness of it—the spinning trees,
the sharp tongue of wind,
the fall into the smell of leaves,
into the cold, into you. Wordless.

— Patricia Kennedy Bostian, from "Sunday Afternoon"

2012-02-01T21:21:00.001-08:00

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire, drooped abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, like angels' wings, enlarging the circle of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine; at once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Her head was a hole lost to time. All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax---a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the shattered hole where her head should have been, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling---only glowing within, like a boiling fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

— Annie Dillard, from "The Death of a Moth"

2012-02-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

"How I wanted to photograph you — the hands — the mouth — & eyes — & the enveloped in black body — the touch of white — & the throat —"

Alfred Stieglitz, from a letter to Georgia O'Keeffe

2012-01-31T19:05:00.001-08:00

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight.

— Emily Dickinson

2012-01-31T18:53:00.000-08:00

Trying to explain
how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time,

how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying
to describe the ways sex darkens

and dies, how two bodies can lie
together, entwined, out of habit.

Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire,
on an old couch that no longer reassures.

The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest
and found ourselves in fog so thick

our lights were useless. There's no choice,
you said, we must have faith in our blindness.

— Dina Ben-Lev, from "Driving"

2012-01-29T20:49:00.000-08:00

Pablo Picasso

2012-01-29T20:44:00.001-08:00

When I was in America I for the first time travelled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there on the earth the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves, I saw the simple solutions of Braque, I saw the wandering lines of Masson, yes I saw and once more knew that a creator is contemporary, he understands what is contemporary when the contemporaries do not yet know it, but he is contemporary and as the twentieth century is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it never has had, and as everything destroys itself in the twentieth century and nothing continues, so then the twentieth century has a splendor which is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has that strange quality of an earth that one has never seen and of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed. So then Picasso has his splendor.

— Gertrude Stein, Picasso

2012-01-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

Nan Goldin -Simon and Jessica in bed, faces half-lit, Paris, 2001

2012-01-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

We lay in bed, back to back, burning
where the flesh intersects: shoulder, kidney, hip
the soles of our feet.

I would rather feel your palm pressed to my spine
holding back the shadows from the moon through the blinds
which lay across our backs like bars.

But no-one wants to be the first to turn around.
For you, only, I will try. I will try. For you.

— Caron Andregg, "Intersection"

2012-01-29T14:57:00.000-08:00

We’ll stagger
from the train wanting
resuscitation, and find it

in the coast, grains of sand.
In chiaroscuro and carugi.

We’ll keep time, then, by nothing
but nail-notch, a cut

in dimpled rinds. We’ll find
a scent to make us want to live:

sun-fed, needy.
Flesh at the point of breaking.

— Dilruba Ahmed, from "Limoni"

2012-01-28T20:49:00.000-08:00

Jackson Pollock

2012-01-28T20:11:00.000-08:00

Who was it that took away my voice?
The black wound he left in my throat
Can't even cry.

March is at work under the snow
And the birds of my throat are dead,
Their gardens turning into dictionaries.

I beg my lips to sing.
I beg the lips of the snowfall,
Of the cliff and the bush to sing.

Between my lips, the round shape
Of the air in my mouth.
Because I can say nothing.

I'll try anything
For the trees in the snow.
I breathe. I swing my arms. I lie.

From this sudden silence,
Like death, that loves
The names of all words,
You raise me now in song.

— Bella Akhmadulina, "Silence" (translated by Daniel Halpern)

2012-01-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

Noa Azoulay-Sclater - Graveyard at a castle in Spain

2012-01-27T20:55:00.001-08:00

Here and there some scrap of beauty gets snatched from this or that: One child's voice rising above the children's choir. A few wild notes of laughter passing through the open window of a passing car. That pink handkerchief waved at the parade. The tiny Nile-blue tile broken at the edge of the mosaic--all shining accident of awe. And this

last second or two of dreaming

in which your face

returns to me completely. Not

even needing to be, being

so alive again to me.

— Laura Kasischke, "Briefly"

2012-01-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

I like slow things, the way they happen
again & again.
Like, say, water as it warms & reaches

boil.
Which takes time.

The balance is not in the stillness
but the way
the water pours from you
as you move from the sea.

— Paavo Haavikko, from "Trees, Their Legacy of Green" (translated by Richard Sieburth)

2012-01-24T20:44:00.000-08:00

“The Black Sea at Night,” by Ivan Aivazovsky, 1879

2012-01-24T20:42:00.000-08:00

Oh distant night!
Yet a leaf that touched us now floats on the waves,
following us into the sea.

— Ingeborg Bachmann, from "Aria I" (translated from the German by Mark Anderson)

2012-01-24T20:39:00.001-08:00

The moon in the door falls to the ground,
let the pieces lie...

— Ingeborg Bachmann, from "Psalm" (translated from the German by Mark Anderson)

2012-01-19T11:03:00.000-08:00

there is no action kind enough to express heartbreak.
I am left
shut,
the quietest of blossoms.

— Stella Padnos, from "Start/The Stopping"

2012-01-18T23:07:00.000-08:00

Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack in the Pulpit No. IV, 1930.

2012-01-18T23:05:00.000-08:00

What I imagine
is what you do not feel.
The soft secret folds of skin
glistening and pink.
An inverted, dewy flower
of silken nerves.

I keep it incognito;
cloth covered
and polite.
Hidden, clamped, closed
and fragrant,
waiting.

I describe the moist crook
of the finger space
between my thumb and pointer.
Bemittened...

is all.

I want you
to hold my hand.

— Ellen Snell Adams, "What We Don't Bring Out in Company"

2012-01-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

Curl of leaf and wave
Curve of the neck and thigh

As much the unseen
as the visible

As much what has disappeared
as what remains

— Michael Palmer, from "The Leonardo Improvisations"

2012-01-18T20:34:00.001-08:00

Francesca Woodman

2012-01-18T20:22:00.000-08:00

The breath of wind that stirs the dust around the dead is my breath.

— Laura Mullen, from "Choosing My Words"

2012-01-18T20:20:00.001-08:00

“The wind is gone.
It waits.”

— Anne Carson, from "The Glass Essay"

(via proustitute)

2012-01-11T20:18:00.000-08:00

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

— Marina Tsvetaeva, from "I Know the Truth" (translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein)

(via literary verve)

2012-01-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

Giulio Monteverde -Valente Celle Tomb, 1893, The Staglieno Cemetery, Genoa - Italy

2012-01-11T19:33:00.000-08:00

Mourn us all in one.
We are all dead.

— Euripides,Herakles, translated by Anne Carson in Grief Lessons

(via proustitute)

2012-01-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

Uta Barth, Ground #70, 1996

2012-01-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between "green thread"
and "broccoli" you find
that you have penciled "sunlight."

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning -- to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing

— Tony Hoagland, from "The Word"

2012-01-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

Lynn Saville - Riverside Park, New York

2012-01-10T17:32:00.001-08:00

Were there trees
where they were children
where I had not been
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born
and in that time did
my father and my mother see them
and when they said yes it meant
they did not remember
What were they I asked what were they
but both my father and my mother
said they never knew

W.S. Merwin, from "Native Trees"

2012-01-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

Max Richter - The Trees

When Thomas brought news that the
house I was born in no longer exists,
Neither the lane nor the park sloping to
the river, nothing,

I had a dream of return. Multicolored.
Joyous. I was able to fly.

And the trees were even higher than in
childhood, because they had been
growing during all the years since they had been cut down.

Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Wormwood Star"

2012-01-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

William Carlos Williams, from "Winter Trees"

2012-01-09T18:09:00.000-08:00

Tammy Rae Carland - Untitled (Lesbian Beds), 2002

2012-01-09T18:06:00.000-08:00

Nights are long just now,

short though

when twilight is on the skin

and someone's breath is mingling with someone's hair.

— Paavo Haavikko, from "The Short Year" (translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas)

2012-01-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

When I turn towards you
in bed, I have a feeling
of stepping into a church
that was burned down long ago
and where only the darkness in the eyes of the icons
has remained
filled with the flames
which annihilated them.

— Henrik Nordbrandt, from "Our Love Is Like Byzantium" (translated from the Danish by the author and Alexander Taylor

2012-01-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

Janet Malcolm, Shelley Winters, 2011. Paper collage, 13 x 8 inches

Janet Malcolm, The Sun with Spots Big Enough to Swallow the Earth, 2011. Paper collage, 10 x 8 inches

Janet Malcolm, Dreams Take Us to the Gardens of Our Youth, 2011. Paper collage, 10 x 8 inches

One gets the sense that a piece’s various elements have only been put down after drafts, many drafts, and reconsiderations: time and revision as part of life’s collage—the space surrounding her images, and bits of colored paper, or yellowing paper, is filled with a quite deliberate absence, like something abandoned but not forgotten, like bodies we have loved but can love no longer.

***

Malcolm’s desire to order the world is not so much the desire to re-create or control it as it’s an exploration of its various elements—those moments of being that are no more, and that were as true and fake as anything else. Grief and fiction are the central themes of her collages; the images are made up out of the real stuff of grief, which is to say artifacts from the past, a desire not to let go, and are the visual representations of the will to remember even as time erodes that will, and we are no more. But that’s not entirely true. The others that come after us remember us as Malcolm remembers her dead, or the not-known-at-all, their various fictions and facts intact as they swim in the muddying waters of what we erroneously describe as the real world.

(via Free Associations: Collages - Hilton Als and Janet Malcolm)

2012-01-08T17:37:00.001-08:00

I summoned up the streets places people
Who were the witnesses of your face
So they would call you so they would unweave
The tissue that death was binding around you.

— Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, from "The Small Square" (translated from the Portuguese by Ruth Fainlight)

2012-01-08T17:29:00.001-08:00

Always the word
the holy word
in a mouth.

— Hilde Domin, “Ars Longa” (translated by Agnes Stein)

2012-01-08T16:56:00.000-08:00

Saul Leiter, 'T', 1950

2012-01-08T16:50:00.001-08:00

Is it true that words carry no promise,
A vast and senseless flash of lightning,

A glittering chest, but full of ashes?

Yves Bonnefoy, from "The Top of the World" (translated from the French by John Naughton)

2012-01-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

“Do words outlast
The world
They describe?”

— Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

(via proustitute)

2012-01-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

Gerhard Richter - Gustave Flaubert Beholds His Beloved, 1966

2012-01-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

— Sylvia Plath, from "The Colossus"

2012-01-07T20:21:00.000-08:00

Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray, 1946

2012-01-07T20:15:00.001-08:00

We are the echo of the future

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

W.S. Merwin, from "The River of Bees"

2012-01-07T15:42:00.001-08:00

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

Tomas Transtromer, from "After a Death" (translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly)

2012-01-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Film still from Monkey's Moon

2012-01-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.

Philippe Jaccottet (translated from the French by Derek Mahon)

2012-01-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

But, I think, the future is also another thing:
a verb tense in motion, in action, in combat,
a searching movement toward life...

Ángel González Muñiz, from "The Future" (translated from the Spanish by Steven Ford Brown and Gutierrez Revuelta)

2012-01-06T19:23:00.001-08:00

Rob Dobi - Music Notes, Abandoned Asylum, 2011

2012-01-06T19:19:00.001-08:00

To write poetry means thinking, but through form, through music--music which helps, if we know how to listen. Poetry is what tries to make music of what occurs in life.

— Yves Bonnefoy

2012-01-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

The problem of time seen through the example of music. Music is returning time. The taut springs of time. Time coursing through certain creative personalities, and so personal time. The time of Beethoven, the time of Brahms, Chopin’s time, Mozart’s time.

These individual times, so varied in their movement, their temperaments, their energies—are subject just the same to the general laws of time. There are always two inclines leading into the present: the past and the future. For all that, though, music taken as a whole holds hints of eternity, of permanence.

The raw material of music is time.

Time is the raw material of our lives, too, although each of us molds something different from it.

Time as a gift, as something given to us—to use, to fulfill, as one fills a glass of wine. It’s given like the coin in the Gospel parable, to be multiplied. And how could time be multiplied except through eternity and outside eternity.

When I listen to music, I feel how time passes, I hear it passing. Time is intensified, revitalized, recharged.

— Anna Kamienska, from Industrious Amazement: A Notebook (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

2012-01-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Eve Arnold, Self-Portrait in a Distorted Mirror, 42nd Street, New York, 1950

2012-01-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

Photographs die. After a while they scarcely remind us of the dead. At first each snapshot is a shock. Then something happens to the pictures, they reveal only a blueprint of the face, not its truth.

— Anna Kamienska, from Industrious Amazement: A Notebook (translated by Clare Cavanaugh)

2012-01-05T18:20:00.001-08:00

I feel the dead in the cold of violets
And that great vagueness in the moon.

The earth is doomed to be a ghost,
She who rocks all death in herself.

I know I sing at the edge of silence,
I know I dance around suspension,
Possess around dispossession.

I know I pass around the mute dead
And hold within myself my own death.

But I have lost my being in so many beings,
Died my life so many times,
Kissed my ghosts so many times,
Known nothing of my acts so many times,
That death will be simply like going
From inside the house into the street.

--Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, "I Feel the Dead"
(translated by Ruth Fainlight)

2012-01-05T18:15:00.001-08:00

Frida Kahlo’s hands and Bonito [the parrot], ca. 1951 by Gisèle Freund