April 2013
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Today I wore a
warm red blood
today men love me
a woman smiled at me
a girl gave me a seashell
a boy gave me a hammer
Today I kneel on the sidewalk
and nail the naked white feet of the passers-by
to the pavement tiles
they are all in tears
but no one is frightened
all remain in the places to which I had come in time
they are all in tears
but they gaze at the celestial...
February 2013
1 post
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The cry of the stag
Is so loud in the empty
Mountains that an echo
Answers him as though
It were a doe.
—Ōtomo no Yakamochi, from Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese.
January 2013
2 posts
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December 2012
1 post
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Life without solitude is a deafening din. Solitude punctuates our life, making it more musical, restores us to ourselves.
—Dumitru Tsepeneag, Pigeon Post, trans. Jane Kuntz.
November 2012
1 post
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October 2012
1 post
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September 2012
1 post
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August 2012
3 posts
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In the river Maeander there is said to be a stone called “wise” by contradiction; for, if one puts it into anyone’s lap, he goes mad, and murders one of his relations.
— from De Mirabilibus Auscultationibus (On Marvellous Things Heard), found in Aristotle - Minor Works, trans. W. S. Hett.
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"For the beast voids a great deal of such...
In Paeonia they say that in the mountain called Hesaenus, which divides Paeonia from Maedice, there is a wild beast called “bolinthus,” which the Paeonians call “monaepus.” They say that the beast is in general character like an ox, but that it is larger and stronger, and also more hairy; for it has a mane on its neck like a horse, stretching down very thickly, and...
July 2012
6 posts
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WatchThe Caretaker, “I Have Become Almost Invisible” from Patience (After Sebald), 2012
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Tell me, if I caught you one day
and kissed the sole of your foot,
wouldn’t you limp a little then,
afraid to crush my kiss?…
— Nichita Stănescu, “A Poem” from Bas-Relief with Heroes, trans. Thomas Carlson
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Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
[…]
— Nichita Stănescu, from “Poetry”, Bas-Relief with Heroes, trans. Thomas Carlson
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GPOY: Meine (geistliche) Geburtsort
Nobody knows why everything around here is so placental, but everybody realizes that it’s normal, because here everything is normal. This is my town.
A town made of Liptauer cream cheese, Lipizzaner horses and Lilliputians of roast chicken, bauernschmaus, liver dumplings and liver sausage, a rhyme, a phrase, a proverb and perhaps not even that but only a waistline, a shoe size, a...
May 2012
2 posts
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“How dark it is. The moon must have stolen away secretly. The stars have thrown...”
– Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House (1948)
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Excerpt from "Anticipate Doom: The Millions...
[…]
TM: Your contemporary Péter Esterházy writes, “The nineteenth-century sentence was long-winded, the meaning wandering through long periodic structures, and in any case the Hungarian long sentence is a dubious formation because the words do not have genders and the subordinate clauses are more uncertainly connected to the main clauses than in the reassuring rigor of a Satzbau (German...
March 2012
1 post
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December 2011
2 posts
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November 2011
3 posts
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Imagine my horror and my stupefaction when, on my return, the first thing to meet my eye was my little fellow, the playful companion of my life, hanging from the closet door! His feet were almost touching the floor; a chair, which he must have kicked from under him, was overturned at his side; his twisted head rested on one of his shoulders; his swollen face and wide-open eyes, with their...
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A visual poem by dsh, from Begin Again: A Book of Reflections and Reversals (with an introduction by Stefan Themerson).
Some of the other poems in the book are printed on loose translucent papers, which are housed in pages that serve as pockets. A reader has to flip and/or rotate the poems to discover their typographical revelations. For Houédard, the tactile-kinetic experience and the...
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Self-development is the kernel of sagacity. Your main duty is towards yourself: you must be the bond-man of your own will. A whimpering baby, you come into the world as into an enemy’s camp: you are not wanted there; henceforth the universe will be against you. You are in the posture of a new poet who is smartly told that the world would have been never the poorer had his effusions remained...
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October 2011
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"There is a plague called man."
I just finished reading Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete—holy fuck! what a book!: as if a womb were to suddenly devour the baby in the final stage of pregnancy; as if everything was digesting everything, perpetually. I might feature some passages, but it’s such a cascade. If you like Bernhard (e.g., Gargoyles), try this one by Lind.
(Image: 1966 Grove Press edition; no artist...
September 2011
2 posts
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August 2011
7 posts
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“I want to say the same words over and over. I want just the sound. I want to...”
– Rudolph Wurlitzer, from Flats
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“That was the time in my life when I was happiest. Why, you ask? It’s a...”
– Dezső Kosztolányi, from “Happiness”, trans. Peter Sherwood
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Robert Walser, "Full", Berlin Stories, trans.... →
July 2011
12 posts
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“In a far-off country many years ago there lived a Black Sheep.
They shot...”
– Augusto Monterroso, “The Black Sheep”, The Black Sheep and Other Fables, trans. Walter I. Bradbury
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“[M]aybe it is impossible to say anything new and better, but the dust of time...”
– Louis Paul Boon, an excerpt from the beginning of Chapel Road, trans. Adrienne Dixon
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