Invite the gods.

. . . the gods get bored with men who have no stories.

Bastard angel

 
“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not. They all wanted to go to bed with me.”*

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

HAROLD NORSE, from his preface, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

*Okay, maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine anything more “open and wonderfully giving” then someone expressing their want/interest/desire “to go to bed with me.”  Thanks for the memoirs, Harold.

Photo: ChicosVegas

Decade

 

What joy touches
the solace of ritual? A void

appears in the life.
A shock so deep, so terrible,
its force
levels the perceived world. You were

a beast at the edge of its cave, only
waking and sleeping. Then
the minute shift; the eye

taken by something.
Spring: the unforeseen
flooding the abyss.

And the life
filling again. And finally
a place
found for everything.

 

Louise Glück from The Seven Ages

 

Photo: Arthur Tress

Yes.

 

But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

JAMES BALDWIN, Giovanni’s Room

It Doesn’t Get Better

“Poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private hidden art….The reason it is not appreciated is because it hasn’t shown any dance, any guts, any moxy.” 

 

 

[The fucking brilliant] JOHN GIORNO at the Bowery Poetry Club, 28/02/09.

Thanks for Nothing

Just Say NO to Family Values

The supreme object of life is to live.*

 

I have put my genius into my life. I have only put my talent into my works.
 

ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?

GILBERT. Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life.
 

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

 
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy…  ["My dear fellow!" -  "Please don't interrupt in the middle of a sentence."] He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.

OSCAR WILDE

Pictured: “Mike B.” (Flickr)

*Few people live.

heart, again

VAUCANSON

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life, when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen,
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
It’s warming again,
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one would find it
And now you can’t remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

JOHN ASHBERY, Notes from the Air

Bring out the mackerel.

“Freedom isn’t a choice the world encourages. You have to wear a suit of armor to defend it.”

—from Starting Out in the Evening (2007) Directed by Andrew Wagner. Screenplay by Fred Parnes and Andrew Wagner based upon the novel by Brian Morton.

Wendy: “I’m just trying to talk about it.”

Jon: “No, we’re not in therapy right now, we’re in real life.”

—from The Savages (2007) Written and Directed by Tamara Jenkins.



“Enlightened” thought by headshrinkers with their own rich broth of problems has twisted these normal human pleasures and delights ["one-nighters", affairs] into shabby, shameful perversions and boundary violations needing to be drummed out of the species because someone’s always seen as the loser-victim and someone’s definition of wholesome and nurturing doesn’t always get validated. But we all know that’s wrong, whether we have the spirit to admit it or don’t. Women are usually full participants in everything they do . . . and I’m ready to say that when it comes to wholesome, nurturing and long-lasting, a frank, good-hearted roll in the alfalfa, or something close to it, with an enthusiastic and willing female is about as nuturing and wholesome as I can imagine. And if it doesn’t last a lifetime, what (pray tell me) does, except marriages where both parties are screaming inside to let light in but can’t figure out how to.

—the best motivational question in the spirituality catechism, and one seeking an answer worth remembering, may not be “Am I good?” (which is what my rich Sponsorees often want to know and base life on), but “Do I have a heart at all?” Do I see good as even a possibility? —anymore than that is more spiritual than I can get.

RICHARD FORD, from The Lay of the Land

Photo: MARK DOTY, Frank’s Grave – “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”

It was a revelation.

Rodin knew that the first indispensable factor was an [the] unerring knowledge of the human body [my ital].

His [Rodin's] art was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realization of something small, something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him. He devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty, must come when all was ready for it, as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.

With this discovery began Rodin’s own peculiar work. All traditional conceptions of plastic art now lost their meaning for him. Pose, group, compostion, none of these things any longer existed. Only an endless variety of living surfaces, only life; and the mode of expression which he had evolved for himself was immediately concerned with that life. It was henceforth a question of making Life and all its fullness obey his purpose. Rodin seized upon Life as he saw it everywhere about him. He laid hold of its slightest manifestations, he observed it, he sought it out. He lay in wait for it at moments of transition, of hesitation, he overtook it in flight, and everywhere he found it equally great, powerful and enthralling. No part of the body was insignificant or negligible, every part was alive. Life showing in the face, full of reference to time and as easily read as on a dial, was, when seen in the body, less concentrated, greater, more mysterious and eternal. There it wore no disguise. Where it felt indifference, it showed indifference, and in the proud it was proud . . . Man had become a temple, there were thousands upon thousands of such temples, all of which were alive and no two alike. But the thing was to show that they were all the temples of one God.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Auguste Rodin

I first read (devoured) this slim volume of Rilke’s observations on Rodin in university, a rare copy found only in the stacks at the Main Branch of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. It’s been out-of-print for some time. New editions have recently surfaced (including this one by Dover). An enormous influence.