Numenary

Syrian Markets

Blake — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:39:44 +0000

Having spent $50 to replace a proprietary remote earlier this year, I was sympathetic to the Syrian solution. I listened to the excellent Planet Money podcast #148 today: When Cinnamon Moved Markets, in which the Planet Money team speaks to Tom Sandage, an Economist editor and author of An Edible History of Humanity. In the [...]

Young Travelers

Blake — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:50:04 +0000

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 [...]

Poor Justice

Blake — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:06:40 +0000

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 [...]

The Author Within the Text: The Aporia Reality Effect in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Blake — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:05:35 +0000

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 [...]

Figuring Marcel Broodthaers

Blake — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:09:28 +0000

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 [...]

Why the Facebook Nation Lacks a Narrative

Blake — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:01:21 +0000

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?

The Transcendent Line: Comparing Line in Jackson Pollock and Piero Manzoni

Blake — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:02:18 +0000

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

Power Outage

Blake — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:54:55 +0000

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.

Glassworks

Blake — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:08:03 +0000

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.

Ceremonial

Blake — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:41:58 +0000

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