1269 Arts and sciences poems

After Piranesi The faded remains of ancient advertising — captives on parade in native costume. Now the whangam, that imaginary animal led by Wharfinger, keeper of the wharf. And you, my puce, sitting between the paws of the mechanical lion, his brittle heart of glass. The regiments of holiday shoppers, in formations two-by-two, are borne along the sliding pavements between displays into the Pavilion of the Encrusted Compass. O hub of panopticon, each moment on display, from the central monitor there is no escape. This is all accomplished, even the symphonic wrecking of the antique locomotive, in silence. I have misplaced my whipcat and whinstone. I try to recall something that I know. A westing is a space of distance westward. Wheep: the sound of steel drawn from a sheath. What was the name of the Babylonian sidekick of Sir Thomas More’s lead warren? Time for the steam-driven, slow reckoning, for the chains and block and tackle dangling from the eternally unfinished dome, the chrome- plated waterfall and the ascension into the arcades, the arcades and their broken promises.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

According to Lin Yutang, both Po Chuyi and Su Tungpo "desperately admired" Tao Yuanming, a poet of nature who wrote a single love poem, a poem thought by Chinese dilettantes to be the one "blemish in a white jade." Can a poet be faulted for calling a woman carelessly perfect in beauty ? He chose to long for her by envying the candle that glowed upon her beautiful face, the shadow that followed in her every move. Yet the nature poet Tao Yuanming, at home with the sudden turning of seasons, now feared the shadow in darkness, a discarded fan that once stirred her hair, feared the candle at dawn. At last believed that for beauty he had lived in vain.

The mask that burns like a violin, the mask that sings only dead languages, that loves the destruction of being put on. The mask that sighs like a woman even though a woman wears it. The mask beaded with freshwater pearls, with seeds. The plumed mask, the mask with a sutured mouth, a moonface, with a healed gash that means harvest. A glower that hides wanting. A grotesque pucker. Here’s a beaked mask, a braided mask, here’s a mask without eyes, a mask that looks like a mask but isn’t—please don’t try to unribbon it. The mask that snows coins, the mask full of wasps. Lace mask to net escaping thoughts. Pass me the rouged mask, the one made of sheet music. Or the jackal mask, the hide-bound mask that renders lovers identical with night.

Fawns in the winter wood Who feel their horns, and leap, Swans whom the bleakening mood Of evening stirs from sleep, Tall flowers that unfurl As a moth, driven, flies, Flowers with the breasts of a girl And sea-cold eyes. The bare bright mirrors glow For their enchanted shapes. Each is a flame, and so, Like flame, escapes.

“This is my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters.” Roberto Bolaño , Distant Star When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned him. I have always know that constipation is essential to poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently, was that poetry itself is repulsive. Words on their own are bad enough. But when placed alongside other words, when formed into rhythmic lines and stanzas: no act of creation is more hideous. In the salons, I have often watched, before my turn came on, our local poets reciting their verses. They speak politely, and with grace, to an audience that sips wine and chuckles at the words that flow not from their mouths, but from their plugged-up behinds. What a holy mockery of literature! Were the barbarians to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter. No, poetry is not what I want. Only defecation on poetry. For after years of humiliation, I have finally learned that to humanize our poems, we must shit on them. We must shit freely, with arms raised, as detectives in blue sport coats examine our feces for sustainability, all the while fighting off other detectives in bluer sport coats who take our poetic leakage to their laboratories to search for parasitic demons, or diamonds, depending on the angle. We smear what drips from our self-inflicted wounds onto our verses, combining blood and ink into new poetic forms in which we rub our faces, the better to smell our disgusting children with, the better to drool on our disgusting children with; and once we have bled and drooled and driveled, we declare our poems complete, the better to wipe our asses with, before submitting them for publication. We smear our typewriters with pus and semen, and chastise any fool crass enough to declare himself a poet, an offense punishable by confinement in a cage surrounded by Barbaric Writers who expectorate between the distinguished author’s eyes, his hands tied behind his back to prevent him from cleaning his face. For poetry is hard work! It is hard to create such filthy, vile putrescence.

The Constellations are a harmoniously composed series of 23 gouaches that Miró painted to escape the trauma of the war years. — The Joan Miró Foundation We’ve all gouached. Haven’t we? Pollock lashed stretched canvas that was Nude. Was said to call his Ruth prude and he spat chew in a coffee can and shat bloodily in the can. When I was twenty I spent three hours in a room with the Free- Spirited Types moving from one inviting orifice to the welcome of another. I was lost in my wood, savage and stern. But also I understood that when it was later and I was wiser I could never forgive Herr Pfizer. My father said we’ve all got an East River. He had a tenuous web of veins for a liver. His loss. Literally. Mom’s impatient art was proved to be the most effective part of her mothering: you should see her rich greens well up in the power of the middle and grow lean as they colonize the crusted edges. My love for her is impregnable. Pity Miró, moonblind, weary on the rocky coast of Portugal, walking cliff paths and getting lost. His quest for childish wonder has bent him and riddled his skin before its time. Put this together with that! Paint it yellow! Murk the sky with banks of Periwinkle and Snow. Gouache a widened eye low on the right, so it can behold the left and the night.

This poem is essentially about life and death. What is clear about this particular poem, compared to most poetry, is that through the voice of the speaker the reader can feel the emotions and thoughts of the author flattening down into points that come across as very personal to delight and sadden the younger readers of today. In almost all other poetry there is a “speaker” who goes upward and upward, a machine that absorbs vibration from bigger machines but if it happens here now, in this poem will there be anyone nearby who wants to see? Maybe the dead know how to live more fully, torches turned down but still fuming like rinds around hot marshmallows do, their divided subject matter focused primarily on dark imagery with symbols of light inside— I never understood the big whoop about Demeter: reading is already a giant supplanting. A new reader discovers this work while he is leaving flowers where his dead bride used to be. But it enables him to be reborn again each time— Persephone is not the unhappy one moving up the dark stairs she considers in her consciousness as light while the poem commences and commences like the days dividing summer from its students, sponges that sway in an undersea film Until the poem spreads, and reaches its conclusion that students are each taught to believe in things differently: that Persephone was a goddess who was abducted by Pluto, the author himself a blue web that exists years and years after his death stuck inside the tired envelope of poetry Who feels he finally is reading himself, the spring flowers intense and papery like they used to be, enabling the reader again to feel the darkness with a rhythm that enables the reader to almost see. Was his conclusion merely a mistake, or did he intentionally use elements of different poems until he finally made his destination, from blue to smoking to flatten, September confused with its light?

for Dore and Adja Under the bronze crown Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet A serpent has begun to eat, Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down Past spattered mosses, breaks On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills The massive third below. It spills In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes A scrim or summery tent For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose. Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent And flatteries of spray, The stocky god upholds the shell with ease, Watching, about his shaggy knees, The goatish innocence of his babes at play; His fauness all the while Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile Bent on the sand floor Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come And go in swift reticulum, More addling to the eye than wine, and more Interminable to thought Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall, Must it not be too simple? Are we not More intricately expressed In the plain fountains that Maderna set Before St. Peter’s—the main jet Struggling aloft until it seems at rest In the act of rising, until The very wish of water is reversed, That heaviness borne up to burst In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill With blaze, and then in gauze Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine Illumined version of itself, decline, And patter on the stones its own applause? If that is what men are Or should be, if those water-saints display The pattern of our aret ê , What of these showered fauns in their bizarre, Spangled, and plunging house? They are at rest in fulness of desire For what is given, they do not tire Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse And riddled pool below, Reproving our disgust and our ennui With humble insatiety. Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow Before the wealthy gate Freezing and praising, might have seen in this No trifle, but a shade of bliss— That land of tolerable flowers, that state As near and far as grass Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand Is worthy of water: the dreamt land Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.

For Hai-Dang Phan I have no doubt where they will go. They walk the one life offered from the many chosen. — Robert Lowell They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the partial exception of Penck, and are all male. — John-Paul Stonard He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks in (false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) / Czechia, if it ever catches on what’s it to you. Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel