August 2011
51 posts
4 tags
1. After 'Get Carter'
-after ‘Get Carter’ After ‘Get Carter’ we
Came out depressed and confused.
As Americans, we didn’t know
What was meant by ‘the smoke’
And didn’t like the scene
Where Michael Caine was eaten
By a cloud of white columbine petals. Our friend said I was very disappointed.
On the poster Michael Caine
Has a pump-action shot-gun.
In the movie he never had
A pump-action shot-gun.
But one of the bad guys...
July 2011
15 posts
unspecializeart asked: If there was a shortage of pens, I would give you mine, or a pencil maybe. You write good. How do you do it (because otherwise I'm not asking you anything)?
that was supposed to be about the history of CPR but I got distracted
3 tags
sketches for 'Amfortasland!!'
i. Somebody’s loved one playing Bruch in the cathedral. Movement one, the Vorspiel. Movement two, adagio, please. Two wounded kings bumbling around the same dark zone, the set of rooms, the wounded perimeter, the poorly maintained antechambers and mounds of dirty rushes. The two bodies tethered by a spatial relation. Somebody spread out on a couch in the lobby. An animal outside pinned to the past...
4 tags
Untitled Popham State Park
These kids don’t know what ocean is,
These swelled salt-lozenge evenings,
These beds of salt, these salt looks
And salt problems clamped to the back
Of the knee and carried all the way back home: We came to see the narrow path out
To the island, and walk it, but found
The whole landscape broadened and tamped down.
Men rode their red bikes around tidal pools.
The shape of a face smiling in...
invisionme asked: HEY! WHAT SCHOOL DID YOU TAKE POETRY AT? I'M LOOKING FOR A SCHOOL WHERE I CAN STUDY POETRY.
forthelove--ofmybody asked: If you could invent something to help mankind, what would it be?
4 tags
POLYDORUS IS DEAD: vi. harmonieleerer
I skipped parts 2-5 because I’m not happy with them. The title of this is a really stupid John Adams pun. I’ll probably change it someday. Certain phrases of this derive from ‘The Golden Bough’ a long book with dumb parts. I found in Euripides’ treatment of Polyxema something of the modern concept of male gaze— the way this beautiful young virgin is suddenly...
thetargetbird asked: I love your treatments of epic characters. Well done.
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POLYDORUS IS DEAD: i. tent spirit
I’m back with another multipart beast that nobody should give a shit about. This time the focus is on Polydorus, a peripheral figure in the Trojan cycle who dies two wildly different but equally evocative deaths in Euripides and Virgil. Overall sequence featuring guest appearances by Cassandra, Hecubah, Agammemnon, Oedipus, etc. There’s even a Noel Coward pun for any sly cats out...
4 tags
Is it stupid to do not so much an imitation of a poet but an imitation of a translation of a poet? Well, here is an attempted imitation of the spare, gnomic quality Burton Raffell gives to the ‘Greek Anthology’ in 2004’s ‘Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Fragments and Poems.’ I guess. Anyway this sucks but it was nice finger exercise.
—
observe
the tern:
...
3 tags
Let's Read Hegel!
The work
Translated as ‘total ontological panic’
Rehearsed in an awful hurry
Released in late beta,
Unsustainable, untenable.
Unrevisable after the hands
Of the author fall off suddenly
At dinner, in the author’s wife’s wine, oh no! The work banished,
Sealed up in jars of vinegar,
Preserved under stones,
Looted by legionnaires,
Mistaken for smugglers’ gold
By boy detectives, debunked
As myth by...
4 tags
Die Gluckliche Hand
Shall we go, shall we go then,
In one minute, in five, to where
Schoenberg sits quartering oranges
With a little knife won in a bet,
Sweet as molasses on a laurel crown, he brags,
And three times as sharp, shall we go
To the near-blue clump of sentinel pines,
To the upturned rotting boat,
The ring of watch-towers staffed
By portable TVs, books on birds,
Maps of regional Bigfoots marked up in red...
Anonymous asked: wow that last poem made me want to eat a tomato bagel and then some pizza and then get naked in the kitchen! way to bring out the imagery
2 tags
At Beautiful Bookstore
There’s a rather nice bookstore in Brunswick, Maine that specializes in poetry. There’s a rather nice coffee-shop across the street too, and while reading there this afternoon I sort of half dozed off and conflated the two in my mind, coming to a few minutes later shaking off these weird splendid memories of reading chapbooks and eating sloppy drippy quiche at once in a paradaisical...
June 2011
22 posts
I suppose I should also note, for the first time I think, that my main blog on Tumblr is here. At this point if I could just combine them, I would, but basically everything except my own writing goes over there.
Well, I see that I’ve just cracked 1,000 followers, yet hadn’t posted a poem in a hell of a long time. That last piece was inspired somewhat by Peter Whigham’s extremely, extremely unusual mid-60s translations of Catullus. If you can get your hands on his take, I recommend it, although I guess I still like Peter Green’s bilingual edition better.
Anyway, I’d like to...
4 tags
Attis in Repair
…sees the signs of new blood posting
the earth, knows arms, legs, torse, sans
male member and
-Catullus, 63, trans. Peter Whigham The body in rest remains undressed.
The body in motion stops for a second
To watch lawn sprinkler run-off into grates, a girl
Perform a lazy sit-up on the lawn and then, gee, god,
How it misses those days of unbashful repose, huh? The body a dream about a walk
Through...
