Universe of Remotes, Syria
Having spent $50 to replace a proprietary remote earlier this year, I was sympathetic to the Syrian solution.
Syrian Spice Stall
I listened to the excellent Planet Money podcast #148 today… Continue reading
There is still some mystique of travel,
Some exquisite danger that requires affirmation
Of arrival. The thought of the plane
Twisting in the air like a fan;
The sharks circling the paralyzed boat
Anchored an impossible distance from the sun.
Even the monotony of the car crash,
Glass burning, bubbling in the wind:
The thought of the body eternally
Cut from its intended destination.
And so we go out… Continue reading
Walking with two cups of French Roast
Across an uneven field,
Coffee dashing across my clothes,
Staining my palms and nails,
I think of Justice and her stillness—
How one step would upset the scales.
No hope of romping across Swiss alps,
Of holding fresh tea leaves,
Or taking a lover in Cleveland
(That blindfold bespeaking her wild side).
No, she must remain rooted in… Continue reading
What caused Wordsworth to proclaim of the sonnets: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet”)? Or led Emerson to proclaim “Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same… Continue reading
Early in his poetic practice, Marcel Broodthaers altered and disrupted textual meaning, questioning our access to it and blurring the line between literal and visual—an obsession that would later characterize his work as an artist. The first hint of this practice occurred when Broodthaers inserted rectangles of monochrome paper over the poems in his book Pense-Bête, enough to scar the poem’s center without obliterating it entirely (Buchloh 79). Throughout his… Continue reading
Renny Gleeson posted an interesting article in which he considers the metaphor of Facebook as a country. He dismisses it arguing that Facebook lacks a narrative or mythology to unite its users like a country unites its citizens. It is worth asking what a narrative looks like in a social network. Where do narratives grow online? What is preventing Facebook from creating that narrative? Continue reading
Jackson Pollock, “One”, 1949
Piero Manzoni, “Line”, 1959
A line. Simplistic and nude, the line bounds and sets loose, delimits and describes. It unites points of space into order, into oneness, allowing depth and physical transport into the canvas. With line, sun-flushed mountains crag up, bowls of fruit retain their freshness, reality is remade and reshaped. Yet what happens when the line makes no attempt at figuration—when it exists only for itself? Or when the artist stashes the Continue reading
Bricks of darkness clatter through the windows.
Virtual space yawns, collapses us back
into the body, into the pink cove
of the mouth, the arch of the synapse,
the dove of loneliness, the blackbird of company.
It is uncomfortable, so much of the self:
gums and guts sounding the body’s memory,
these stories recalling the taste of health.
Somewhere we hope hearts still beep
And the bombs lie asleep in their sheds.
We have learned the cost of silence is cheap
It is time, it is time to go to bed. Continue reading
Why this perpetual desire to be seeing into?
That a poem should be translucent
as the soul, the experience of experience,
written, perhaps, at a train station,
seated by a wide bay of windows—
while the baker and the lemon merchant talk below
(the poem should smell of bread and lemons).
Ultimately, we want windows, not words,
Or perhaps we want to be the poet,
not the reader of poems,
gazing again out of the window. Continue reading
I know you have inherited
A great loss, like the peach pit
Left in your mother’s favorite purse.
At our wrong, over-easy words,
You turned your back.
Then a starling chirped, and launched itself
at the window.
The blow could not be confused
for the wind, and so we stood about the thing
and mourned in the little way required of us Continue reading
