(Here)

@ Boston Review

Opposing Terms: A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking: here.

"Marjorie Perloff’s essay 'Poetry on the Brink' in the May/June 2012 issue rekindled conversation about innovation and canonization in contemporary poetry. To continue and extend the discussion, we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry? Their responses range from whimsy to diatribe, with meditation, appraisal, tangent, touchstone, anecdote, drollery, confection, wit, and argument in between."

Susan Howe

That This


Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery


A secular arietta variation
Grass angels perish in this


harmonic collision because
non-being cannot be 'this'


Not spirit not space finite
Not infinite to those fixed—


That this millstone as such
Quiet which side on which—


Is one mind put into another
in us unknown to ourselves


by going about among trees
and fields in moonlight or in


a garden to ease distance to
fetch home spiritual things


That a solitary person bears
witness to law in the ark to


an altar of snow and every
age or century for a day is

art & introversion

Helen Vendler on admitting (and nurturing) creative undergraduates:

The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college. The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity, originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning. Such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art; the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a single field of study; even the doctrine of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money?

More here.

Vinyl

Many thanks to Vinyl for nominating my poem "The Soporific Well" (link here) for this year's edition of Best of the Net.

curiosity

(click to enlarge)

The first image of the Martian landscape from the Curiosity rover. Curiosity flew 352 million miles to take it... which is, relatively speaking, not very far at all.

rekindled love

Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do is one of those holy-shit-albums that comes around once in an artist's career. It's beautiful, raw, brutally honest, minimalist. Her voice has such a presence. It cracks in all the right places. It's from the gut and that's where it hits me.



I could liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead
but I admit that I provided a full moon
and I could liken you to a shark the way you bit off my head
but then again I was waving around a bleeding open wound

Fiona was my favorite musical artist in 1997, which was a long long time ago. Tidal is a great debut album and I stand by it still. It's a good coming-of-age album -- an album you easily love as a thirteen-year-old girl -- and once in awhile in your adult life you might revive it, not out of some dumb nostalgic desire to relive a sliver of your youth but because it's actually good.

Her subsequent albums are pretty good, too. They have their moments. But not like this. My mind is blown.

a favorite

@ about 4:05.

"A god steps down from the mountain. He walks through the dark forest. There are wild beasts everywhere in the silent darkness. It must be real. I'm not dreaming. I'm telling the truth."

Love Harriet Andersson.

Adam Frank on cosmologies & the experience of time

                                  Astronomical Clock, Prague, installed 1410


Adam Frank, from "Part one: The Equinox and the Tyranny of Modern Time":

"Let me start by asking you a simple question: What time is it right now?

To answer this query you probably looked at the clock on your computer or on your cell phone. It told you something like 9:12 a.m. or 11:22 a.m. or 1:37 p.m. But what is 1:37 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes?

Mechanical clocks for measuring hours did not appear until the fourteenth century. Minute hands on those clocks did not come into existence until 400 years later. Before these inventions the vast majority of human beings had no access to any form of timekeeping device. Sundials, water clocks and sandglasses did exist. But their daily use was confined to an elite minority.

In ancient Rome, for example, noon was called out by someone watching to see when the sun climbed between two buildings. That was how exact it got for most people. Asked what time it was back then, the best you could have answered — the best you needed to answer — would have been 'after lunch.'

So did 1:37 p.m. even exist a thousand years ago for peasants living in the Dark Ages of Europe, Song Dynasty China or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as 1:37 p.m. across the millennia that comprise the vast bulk of human experience?

The short answer is 'no.'

But 1:37 exists for you. As a citizen of a technologically advanced culture, replete with omnipresent time-metering technologies, you have felt 1:37 in more ways then you probably want to think about. Waiting for a 1:30 train into the city you feel the minutes crawl by when the train is late. The same viscous experience of these minutes (and seconds) oozes into your life you each time you wait for the microwave to cycle through its 2-minute and 30-second cooking program.

You feel minutes in a way that virtually none of your ancestors did. You feel them pass and you feel them drag on with all the frustration, boredom, anxiety and anger that can entail. For you, those minutes are real."

Read the rest here.

Part two: Beyond the Punch-Clock Life: The Tyranny of Modern Time II.

Part three: The Universe, The iPhone, and The End of Time.

Part four: The Future of Time.

new Märchen

"While sifting through Von Schönwerth's work, Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch."

More at The Guardian.

Read "The Turnip Princess," one of the new tales, here.

absolutely amazing, if confirmed

"Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of northeastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago."

More here.

Persona (1966)

The Doctor: I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert.

(The lighting in this scene is just perfection.)