on being dead before thirty (edna st. vincent millay)

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

- "First Fig," Edna St. Vincent Millay

filling the void (ammons)

...if you're empty

space only, the form is open
to articial, say, irrational, say

mad fixations that drop into your
bowl: arrange a full life or

the terror of emptiness will fill
emptiness with terror: love's the

best filler but isn't cheap and
anway money can buy only a semblance:

if your forms aren't full of love it
doesn't matter what they're full of:

I do the best I can and god, I suspect,
does the same: his plans allow for

the emergence of the unexpected and
attempt amends for the consequences:

I am in this way made in his image:

- 52, 'Strip,' Glare, A. R. Ammons

on american standards (ammons)

so what is it to be while we are here
in the splendid (America) place:

must we be only splendid and, if not,
trash: can't we be young if not

eternally young...

-2, 'Strip,' Glare, A. R. Ammons

poetic reverberations (ammons)

...do I contradict myself, you

say: well, I get interested in both
sides of the argument: I am unhappily

not an either/or person but a
both/and: I have more sides than

two: I have so many they round off
like a glazed stob or bead of water:

enough about me: I sure wish I could
think about something else

- 65, 'Strip,' "Glare" - A. R. Ammons

cheap thrills and dead divine (aragon)

The world evinces so little faith in human aspirations, as is so knowing about the extent of each depravity, the universal fear of compromising oneself, the mechanical resignation to happiness, habit (the only woman who wears a corset nowadays), that—to my great consternation I admit—I wonder if skipping town for some other region better adapted to the mobility of my nature would not be well advised; that I dream of a sweet, cruel people; a feline people infatuated with its claws and perpetually ready to tear out its eyes and scruples. I dream of a people various like moire and sporting the bruises of love, that no one any longer cares to provide our avid sloth with the diversions to which it dares not lay claim. (42, The Passage de L'Opera)

But midnight is not enough for your adorable ghosts: the entire day and sleep scarcely suffice, in your walls the perpetual noise of a trailing gown disturbs you in some marvelous way, and you love it, that noise. (145, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

Among natural forces one power, acknowledged from time immemorial, remains as mysterious to man as ever, and an integral part of his existence: night. This great black illusion conforms to fashion and to the slightest variations of its slaves. The night of our cities bears no resemblance to that howling of dogs in the Roman shadows, nor to the bat of the Middle Ages, nor yet to that image of sorrows which is the Renaissance night. She is a gigantic monster of sheetmetal perforated with knife holes. The blood of modern night is a singing light. On her breast she wears shifting tattoos. Her hair is curled around sparklers, and where the plumes of smoke finally evaporate, some men have climbed aboard shooting stars. Night has whistles and lakes of incandescence. She hangs like a fruit from the earth’s littoral, like a side of beef from the cities’ golden fist. This palpitating corpse has let her tresses fall loose over the world, and in this nest the last, uncertain ghost of liberties takes refuge, slaking just a few steps from streets brightly lit by the civil sense, its all-consuming thirst for open air and danger. Thus, in public gardens, the densest region of shade merges its identity into a desperate kiss of love and revolt. (115, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

- Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

cheap thrills (aragon)

Everything base contains a touch of the marvelous, which arouses me. A scent of danger always surrounds these ladies: eyes whose circles have been permanently etched and whose weariness is deified by makeup, hands whose devilish expertise their every movement demonstrates, an intoxicating air of facility, their agonizing persiflage, lewd voices, specific trivia which narrate the hazards of a lifetime, signs betraying its suspected calamities; everything about them counsels fear of love’s ignominious perils; yet, with equal persuasion, everything about them shows me the abyss and makes me dizzy. I am bound, presently, to forgive them for consuming me. I am like the cloth merchant in The Thousand and One Nights who married a palace beauty; she thrashed him with a rod because he neglected to wash his hands before caressing her, and then she severed his thumbs with a razor; but he couldn’t fault her on such slight grounds and swore to wash his hands thereafter six-score times with alkali, saltwort ashes, and soap; then he bought a house and lived there for a year with his bride.

- 29, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

passages from "Imagination's Speech" (aragon)

As I said to the students of Germany in 1819, one can anticipate everything from the power of mind. Already its pure, fantastic inventions have, to giddy effect, given you mastery over yourselves; I have invented memory, writing, infinitesimal calculus.
…
Everything stems from the imagination, and all that is imaginary sheds light. The telephone is purportedly useful: don’t believe a word of it; just observe man convulsing over the receiver as he shouts ”Hello?” What is he if not an addict of sound, dead drunk on conquered space and the transmitted voice? My poisons are yours: here is love, strength, speed. Do you want pains, death or songs? (51)

Go right ahead, buy your damnation; at last you’re about to lose yourself—here’s a machine to upend your soul. I bring tidings of supreme importance: a new vice has just been born, one more source of vertigo has been given to man, surrealism, son of frenzy and darkness. Enter, enter, here begin the realms of the instantaneous. (52)

Soon, tomorrow, the obscure desire for security which unites mankind will dictate primitive taboos. (53)

Some words are mirrors, optical lakes toward which hands stretch in vain. (73)

- Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on systems unthinkable (aragon)

There exists in the world an unthinkable disorder, and the extraordinary thing is that, as a rule, men have sought a mysterious order beneath the appearance of disorder, an order entirely natural to them which merely expresses an innate desire of theirs and which, once they have introduced it into things, they behold with wonder, ascribing it to an idea, explaining it in light of that idea. So it comes about that for them everything is providential, and they account for a phenomenon which merely bears witness to their reality, which is the relationship they establish between themselves and, say, the germination of a poplar, by an hypothesis which sets their minds at rest; then they wonder at a divine principle which gave the lightness of a cotton to a seed requiring air enough to ride in its countless appointed rounds of self-propagation.

Man’s mind cannot tolerate disorder because it cannot think it; I mean that it cannot think it first, in isolation. That every idea arises hand in hand with its opposite is a truth suffering from the lack of examination. Disorder is conceived only in relation to order, and, subsequently, order only in relation to disorder. But only subsequently. The form of the word itself determines that. Your intention, in giving a divine character to disorder, is to make it impossible for disorder to evolve from an abstract conception into a concrete value. The concept of order is scarcely counterbalanced by the ineradicable concept of disorder. Whence the divine explanation.

- 154, "The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

deceitful letters (aragon)

I wanted to know if there still existed somewhere in his domain a bizarre institution which Paul Valery had once described to me: an agency where one could arrange to have letters mailed from any point of the globe to any given address, thus making it possible to fake a voyage to the Far East without straying even one inch from the Far West of some lawless escapade. I couldn’t uncover a clue: the concierge had never heard of any such place…. After all, what does a concierge know? And perhaps it’s been more than twenty years since Paul Valery has had occasion to use such deceit.

15, "The Passage de L’Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on hope: pushing through to the future (miller)

We are in the habit of speaking of “the last frontier,” but wherever there are “individuals” there will always be new frontiers. (18)

…the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence, that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great. The presence of these “renegades,” small in number though they be, is but another indication that the machine is breaking down. (18)

"Part One: Oranges of the Millenium," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on desperation and originality (miller)

…the man who is about to blow his top does not have to fix his eye on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy or any other great model; he has only to give us, in his own language, the saga of his woes and tribulations, the saga of his non-existentialism. In this mirror of not-ness everyone will recognize himself for what he is as well as what he is not.

- 58, "Part Two: Peace and Solitude: A Potpourri," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Boch, Henry Miller

technology and love (daphne marlatt)

how little the reach, what is love love? its
impossible repeat attenuated through telephone
wire the light letter language of 'fax it,' hearts
darling and x's intend body's imprint, stand in for
the unremitting smell of your skin just there at
neck's bony hollow in your hair both kinds that
arc the pelvic ridge keys your other speech
close up and swollen lips aflare with wet
declaration bold face - without which i sleep
small print in the white of the page

- "small print," daphne marlatt

on failures and fairytales (sandra gilbert)

Then it was that little Gerda walked into the Palace, through the
great gates, in a biting wind.... She saw Kay, and knew him at once;
she flung her arms round his neck, held him fast, and cried, "Kay,
little Kay, have I found you at last?"

But he sat still, rigid and cold.

---Hans Christian Andersen, "The Snow Queen"

You wanted to know "love" in all its habitats, wanted
to catalog the joints, the parts, the motions, wanted
to be a scientist of romance: you said
you had to study everything, go everywhere,
even here, even
this ice palace in the far north.

You said you were ready, you'd be careful.
Smart girl, you wore two cardigans, a turtleneck,
furlined boots, scarves,
a stocking cap with jinglebells.
And over the ice you came, gay as Santa,
singing and bringing gifts.

Ah, but the journey was long, so much longer
than you'd expected, and the air so thin,
the sky so high and black.
What are these cold needles, what are these shafts of ice,
you wondered on the fourteenth day.
What are those tracks that glitter overhead?

The one you came to see was silent,
he wouldn't say "stars" or "snow,"
wouldn't point south, wouldn't teach survival.
And you'd lost your boots, your furs,
now you were barefoot on the ice floes, fingers blue,
tears freezing and fusing your eyelids.

Now you know: this is the place
where water insists on being ice,
where wind insists on breathlessness,
where the will of the cold is so strong
that even the stone's desire for heat
is driven into the eye of night.

What will you do now, little Gerda?
Kay and the Snow Queen are one, they're a single
pillar of ice, a throne of silence---
and they love you
the way the teeth of winter
love the last red shred of November.

- "The Last Poem About the Snow Queen," Sandra Gilbert

on drawing and the rain (bishop)

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

- "Sestina," Elizabeth Bishop

on living underneath and being so small (erin belieu)

He lived in a sod house,
a formal nest of grass
that wove green thread
around his soul, a bed
of mud and cellulose.

And she was small. She
never grew; the empty
wind that blew and reared
had bent her to the plains she cared
so little for. But he,

he didn't seem to mind
her size, he'd found
a shape to love there;
and she was spare where
he was generous as sand, the kind

of man who drifted
like the yellow hills that lifted
their sloping shoulders to the bad
lands. For her his mud
heart tumbled like the tufted
weeds that wheel along the plains,
that sea of mammoth bones,
that state all made of sky—
they married in July.
Her thin bouquet of corn

flowers remains the brightest thing
he'd ever see. I have her ring
now, a silver band so little
it won't budge over the knuckle
on my pinky. How long

ago, a man gave his grass
soul to her in her brown dress—
and she was always stern,
too small, and learned
to keep inside a sod house.

- "Plainsong," Erin Belieu

on threats and tangents (jan bottiglieri)

And it would deflect bullets.
And it would shimmer like the scales
of a rainbow fish leaping up.
Each button would be the subject
of an historical treatise
written
after years of torturous research.

One from a doll's dress, no, her eye.
One from the shoulder of a shroud –
but no, it is not what you think.
One button would depict the life
of an obscure and lesser saint,
scrimshawed
on the bone of a famous whale.

This is not a thing one would ride
roughshod over. Not a coarse thing
discussed over back fences.
Believe me, thousands of the faithful
hoi-polloi would have gathered here,
fevered,
had I remembered to alert

the proper authorities. True,
the hands that sewed each button on
first rocked kings in their crude cradles.
True, it can predict the weather
but it's not very accurate.
Stricken
with fear, its enemies recoil.

And once again, I mention here
that it can deflect bullets.
Or would, of course. I should say would.
If such a thing, but. . .well. You know.
Just be advised that you have been
advised.
You all might as well drop those guns.

- "One Could Have a Cape Made Entirely of Buttons," by Jan Bottiglieri

on revenge and bridge-burning (tim blackwell)

i set fire
to the phone book

i wanted to see
your name in lights

no-one worth talking to anyhow

nights.

- "nights," Tim Blackwell

on saying one thing and meaning another (bishop)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop

on crises and repetition (elizabeth macklin)

"There is no way to peace
Peace is the way"--A. J. Muste.

There is nothing to be said
beyond the facts
and, This is a disaster.

In another language
the word soon
rhymes with disaster.

The word for corner
as in everyone is cornered
also rhymes with disaster.

Then there is the part
where slow is slow,
and faster is only faster and faster.

- "In Another Language," Elizabeth Macklin

(ceci n'est pas une pipe) on simulations and being and madness (winter)

You cannot hear me. I am not talking. This is a recording. You
will hear more. Every new recording will explain the recording that comes before, except for this recording, which can explain nothing. Nothing comes before this recording. This is a recording.

This is a recording of bird sounds. Listen to the birds. You are in a forest. You are lost. You have been lost for days. There is nothing to eat. There are birds only. You must kill the birds. But you cannot see the birds. This is a recording.

You must resist this recording. You are in a forest. This will not help you. Nothing will help you. You must help yourself. You must listen to the voices. They only want to help you. You must decide which voice to hear. It must not be my voice. This is not a voice. This is a recording.

This is not a recording of birds. This is a recording of you, crying.
It goes on for hours. No one can hear you. You are in a forest. There are no birds here. There is only you. You are crying. This is a recording.

If you can hear this, something is wrong. There is no voice. No one is speaking. You are hearing voices. You must be careful. You are in a forest. You are lost. You are crying. There are no birds here. There is only me. You must find me. You must destroy me. This is a recording.
- Jonah Winter, "This is a Recording"

on housing difficulties or the lack thereof (the gospel of john)

1 Let not your heart be troubled.... 2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
- John 14, KJV

on tricky creations (aragon)

It would appear that to God, the world is merely a vehicle for several essays at still-life painting. He has a handful of gimmicks to which he invariably resorts: the absurd, the bizarre, the banal… there is no way to getting him to enlarge his scope.

- 37, The Passage de L'Opera, Le Paysan de Paris, Lois Aragon

on motivation (bourgeois)

On “Untitled,” 1949: …It is a mechanical thing. By mechanical you mean something that works. I am interested in cars because they self-propel themselves for reasons that are reasonable and mechanical. So this is it: How am I going to be self-operating all by myself? Well, I can do that if I can invent something that keeps me going.
- 83, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations – Louise Bourgeois w/ Lawrence Rinder

on portraits and peopling the world (bourgeois)

On “Untitled,” 1946: At one point I stopped making self-portraits, and I included the people that lived with me. I would say that it had to do with the problem of the toi and the moi, of the you and the me. Life is not worth living if you talk only about the moi. Life is interesting in terms of others. To be without others, it is not worth living. To live alone—unless you are religious character—isn’t worth it.
- 53, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations – Louise Bourgeois w/ Lawrence Rinder

on love and fullness (aragon)

There are moments when everybody is unequal to his love, moments which resemble an overripe berry, moments gorged with themselves. By collateral paths desire and rapture have increased, and when they touch, when they merge, in a leap, a reeling of vision, I attain myself beyond my own means, beyond circumstances, which are no longer the several glimmering aspects of things, but my life, life itself, the instinct of survival, the thought that I am a continuous being transcending all my endeavors, transcending memory; I attain myself, I attain the concrete feeling of existence which is cloaked in death.

- 116, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on chance and delight (aragon)

I am the receptacle of my sense and of chance. I am like a gambler engaged in roulette who would laugh in your face if you came round urging him to invest in petroleum stock. I am playing the wheel of my body and betting on red.

- 2, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on belief and love (aragon)

They told me that love is laughable, they told me that it’s simple, and explained how my heart works. So it seems. They told me not to believe in miracles, that if the table turns, somebody is nudging it with his foot. Finally, they showed me a man who falls in love on command, really in love, in love! can you beat that? in love; it’s the oldest story around.

But you don’t realize just how gullible I am, how ready at this point to believe anything: flowers could sprout up in her footsteps; she could turn night into broad daylight, and all the fantasies of the drunk or imagining mind, and it wouldn’t seem extraordinary. If they do not love, they are blind. I have seen the big white ghost with a broken chain emerge from the crypt; they, on the contrary, have not sensed the divinity of this woman. It strikes them as natural that she should be there, coming and going: their knowledge of her is abstract, it is formulated at one remove. The inexplicable does not strike them as obvious, does it?

- 145, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

aragon on wonder and love

Good people, my information comes from heaven. The secrets of every soul, like the secrets of language and of love, are revealed to me nightly, and there are nights in broad daylight. When you pass near me your clothing flies off; you account books flip open to the page dissimulations and frauds; your alcove is unveiled, and your heart as well! Your heart like a butterfly-sphinx in the sun, your heart like a ship foundering on a reef, your heart like a compass crazed by a little piece of lead, like laundry drying in the wind, like the whinnying of horses, like millet thrown to birds, like a discarded evening paper. Your heart is a charade known to everyone. (69, Imagination's Speech)

Charming substitute, you are the synopsis of a world of wonders, of the natural world, and it is you who are reborn when I close my eyes. You are the wall and its breach. You are the horizon and the immediate presence. The ladder and the iron rungs. Total eclipse. Light. Miracle. And can anyone think of what isn’t miracle when miracle stands there in her nightdress?” Thus the universe gradually effaces itself for me; it melts away while from its depths the outline of an adorable ghost emerges, an immense female, pressing against me on all sides, in the stablest aspect of a waning world. O desire, twilight of forms, in the rays of this decline of life I seize myself like a prisoner at the bars of liberty, me the inmate of love, convict number…, and there follows a number too long for my mouth to memorize. (138, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont)
- Le Paysan de Paris

poetry: on practicality (topp)

Theory

Theoretically if you take all the blood vessels out of your body and laid them end to end you would die.

- Mike Topp