Home >  Monthly Archives: October 2015

140 / 85
 
writing (n)

: the uncomfortable 
  process of organizing
  uncomfortable feelings.
[80]

1024 / 44

years from now; years ago

My daughter doesn’t like this website. Complains, “I don’t know what it means.” Her critique doesn’t come from a lack of smarts; she’s a savvier ten-year-old than I ever was.

It comes, I think, from not being able to place the website—from not being able to hear in it some ring of attitude and message. Yes, of course. That’s right.

Maybe I have sacrificed, preferring a kind of ambient bleed to the language of universality. But everything I put down here has a particular, if not constant, meaning to me. That is one essential criteria to my self-editing.

Of course, positions are important, and for that there are other, better fora. In this place, I’ve carved out a small hollow on the Interwebs as a kind of catch basin of the particular—the moving surface of an experience, transmitted in a language that is parcel to it.

There is discipline in smallness, consistently applied. Smallness, thus construed, is that which contains nothing more than the internal coherence of what is said or made or done now. It gathers what power it can from claiming to be nothing else.

//On Smallness/6//

[197]

140 / 86
 
prairie poem:

come winter,
them cloud banks
ruff up like
morning, wolf-
haired mountains.

and Jimmy, me,
we forget
we live in
flatlands.
[127]

200 / 53
 
immaculate (adj)


: i used to think
       her pale blue
  like her hijab.

: these days i
       see nothing
  and much of it.

: a tesseract,
       untainted, 
  and for always 

: unfolding.
[28]

140 / 87
 
die Stadtkatze

eyeliner black,
 cigarette gris,
plum bundled sphinx
 in tabby-color curls.
she squints up at
 the walkers by,
blaming them.
[132]

1024 / 45

Arrow Slot

An arrow slot of a stone tower. Taken in Bratislava, Slovakia, September 2015, using the iPhone pano feature. By gently rocking the phone back and forth while panning, you can get pano to produce these undulations.

Here’s the same effect, this time with a carved relief of the Last Supper in St. Martin’s cathedral. The undulations of pano give the scene the liquid feel of an El Greco. This version seems to me to be more uneasy, more expressive than the original.

Last Supper

 

[82]

140 / 88
 
Givamene_

Hers were
  cross-wise
strips of phrases

layered
  upon
this simple thing:

Love tries.
  It wakes
and tries again.
[115]

200 / 54

“You see—no—you see beneath the crosswise strips of phrases laid—it’s like papier-mâché put over a plain and simple thing—an egg—and built up, layered over and over and shaped and painted Amazon blue and with fat gelb spots so it becomes this EGG—it says—this thing—it says, look, this isn’t just some sign system, the words just don’t stand for things, no more than things just sit at the end of words, it says, when I make an EGG of an egg, what I am doing is saying less in MORE, expending words like bullet rounds, billions of them, until there are burnt, hot shells all everywhere, and the thing itself is left riddled and warped and smoking and smelling like burnt vulcan rubber, it says, no, it says this thing, whatever it is, is more than what we think it is, and that the words that I used to make it, or describe it, or whatever I was doing, are more than what they mean—THAT is what I am trying to do. I wake up every morning and I try to do that.”

– Creye Givamene, 1963

[198]

140 / 89
 
Here, Halloween,
I've dressed as Dreadful_
clicking heels
past the bagmen,
the four-job moms_
a child once lost
grown numb
to perdition.
[129]