SAMUEL DELANY ~

 

R E A D    M E

photo: James Hamilton

2015

AMIT CHAUDHURI ~

 

Our Parents

How embarrassing they are!

Some of their views

can be extraordinary.

Increasingly, we were torn

between protecting and

disowning them

for at least fifteen minutes.

In the end, when they left,

it had little to do with us.

They don't stick to a plan.

On one level, so focussed

on organising our lives,

on another, as it turns out,

unreliable in their departure.

The Writers

                On constantly mishearing "rioting"

                        as "writing" on the BBC

There has been writing for ten days now

unabated. People are anxious, fed up.

There is writing in Paris, in disaffected suburbs,

but also in small towns, and old ones like Lyon.

The writers have been burning cars; they've thrown

homemade Molotov cocktails at policemen.

Contrary to initial reports, the writers

belong to several communities: Algerian

and Caribbean, certainly, but also Romanian,

Polish, and even French. Some are incredibly

young: the youngest is thirteen.

They stand edigly on street-corners, hardly

looking at each other. Long-standing neglect

and an absence of both authority and employment

have led to what are now ten nights of writing.

                                                                                                                                2005

______________________________________

Amit Chaudhuri

Sweet Shop

New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023

NYRB, 2023

READ: "The Agony of a Ceasefire That Never Comes" ~

 

Mosab Abu Toha

  R E A D     M E

RANDALL KENAN ~

 

R E A D    M E

Norton, 2022

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY : LETTERS ~

 

R E A D    M E

Yale 2023

ANDRE WILLIAMS ~

 

ARCHIVE : AGNES DENES ~

 

A G N E S    D E N E S

The Shed, 2020

ROQUE DALTON ~

 

Like You

Like you I

love love, life, the sweet smell

of things, the sky-blue

landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up

and I laugh through eyes

that have become the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful

and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me

but in the unanimous blood

of those who struggle for life,

love,

little things,

landscape and read,

the poetry of everyone.

El Salvador Will Be

El Salvador will be a pretty

and (without exaggeration) serious country

when working class and peasantry

fertilize and comb and talc it

cure the historical hangover

clean it up reconstruct it

and get it going.

The problem is that today El Salvador

has a thousand rough edges and hundred thousand pitfalls

about five hundred thousand calluses and some blisters

cancers rashes dandruff filthiness

ulcers fractures fevers bad odors.

You have to round it off with a little machete

sandpaper lathe turpentine penicillin

sitz-baths kisses and gunpowder.

translated by Jack Hirschman

_________________

Roque Dalton

Clandestine Poems

introduction by Margaret Randall

Solidarity Publications, 1984

IDA VITALE ~

Trees

Is this Orlando's oak or are these oaks from Austin?

Is this Hudson's ombu or the one beside the car

that dragged Julio-my-almost brother from life?

Paz's banyan tree, that was also Shakuntala's?

The willows of Garcilaso? The one that I myself planted?

Poplars of love, or that one in winter

from which half-dead birds fell at my feet?

Trusty figs, among the dust and gardens?

That axis in the tropism of infinite moons,

a pale eucalyptus of perfumed down?

Those with lacquer-red flowers under fiery suns?

The birch/abedul I imagined black, for the ebony/abenuz,

until I touched its white, ringed bark?

The essential tree of Goethe's imagination?

Or the one in whose shade I lost the world

that was itself a murmur of friendly voices

and I see a river flow that is the same always,

whereas I watch it and am no longer the same?

________________

Ida Vitale

Time Without Keys

Translated by Sarah Pollack

New Directions, 2023

Happy Birthday!

THE INTERVIEW ~

 

CNN: October 21, 2023

PETE TOWNSHEND ~

 

DARK DESTINATIONS ~

 

G O 

AFROFUTURISM ~

 

    A F R O F U T U R I S M

Smithsonian, 2023

HELEN ADAM ~

Dirge for a Dazzling Star

 

"The Pole Star is dying,

The planets bend over it,

They lower it into

A bottomless grave."

The Pole Star is dead,

But shining, shining.

The Pole Star is shining

In a bottomless grave.

The Babes in the Wood

Are sleeping, sleeping.

The Babes in the Wood

And the wolf at the breast.

The moon of late morning

Fadeth for sorrow

For sorrow she fadeth

Far down in the west.

Not a sound in the world

While the Pole Star was dying.

Not the cry of a child,

Nor the crash of a wave.

No sound over Earth

But sighing, sighing,

For the Pole Star alive

In a bottomless grave.

~ Helen Adam

THE GREAT GREY OWL ~

 

PHILLIP LOPATE ~

 

EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

9.

I have experienced enough in the way of people's strange behaviors

to not be surprised by sudden breakouts of kindness, brutality, ten-

derness, betrayal, inconsistency, vanity, rigidity, schadenfreude and

its opposite. What does surprise me is current events. When 9/11

happened I was taken aback by such a freakish thing. (It was, to me,

no accident that 9/11 occurred on the other side of the millennium,

in 2001: No good, I thought, can come of the twenty-first century.

Not that the twentieth did not have its share of nasty surprises.) I con-

tinue to marvel at Republicans' seeming willingness to shut down

the federal government and allow the United States to default rather

than negotiate with the president. I don't understand my country

anymore: how, after a century of federal programs such as the New

Deal, social security, bank regulation, public housing, and food

stamps, a large swath of the population can still take umbrage at the

government's minimal efforts to protect the weak and the poor, or

indeed to have a presence in any aspect of life beyond the mainte-

nance of military force. Nothing prior has prepared me for this

frightening swerve. I grew up in the postwar atmosphere of a mod-

estly progressive welfare state, where problems such as racial segre-

gation and poverty were expected to be addressed as the governmental

level, and I assumed naively that we were marching at best or creep-

ing at worst toward a more just society. What I took for an inevitable

historical progression turned out to be an anomalous blip. I might

better have looked in Nietzche's theory of eternal recurrence. Today

I am less experienced, less able to adapt to this harshly selfish envi-

ronment than the average twenty-year-old, who has grown up with-

out my New Deal-Great Society set of expectations.

________________________

Phillip Lopate

A Year and A Day

NYRB 2023

TCM UNDERGROUND ~

 

R E A D    M E

SAX KARI ~

 

MAUS NOW ~

 

M A U S

ART SPIEGELMAN"s BREAKDOWNS ~

B R E A K D O W N S 

Pantheon, 2022

MORRIS GRAVES FLOWERS ~

 

Summer Flowers for Denise, 1978

   ARCHIVE

R E A D     M E

University of Washington

1994

TIBET, THE PATH TO WISDOM ~

 

ALEISTER CROWLEY ~

C R O W L E Y    M A P

RICHARD CABUT ~

 

Bright Sad Star

Bright sad star

fell down from the sky,

but she's going back there.

Brand new,

brand now

revenge.

She was going back up there,

blazing, falling star.

The world is a heaving bucket full-to-the-brim-of dirt

with a sparse sprinkling of joy on top

— and that sprinkling is made of stardom.

They'll all be sorry.

He thought about ugliness and beauty

and how things slip through

your fingers like powder,

and wondered whether or not

he had any real sympathy for

her,

who he knew, would in the future be tiny and

exposed and at the mercy of forces

that she could never control.

Beauty will save the world, he resolved — Idiot.

Her thoughts were in monochrome —

giving her the feeling and pressure of

an explicit migraine.

An austere psychological aesthetic.

It all droned on in her head

nihilistically.

Bright sad star

fell down from the sky.

______________________

Richard Cabut

Disorderly Magic

Far West Press, 2023

TRACKING & THE ART OF SEEING ~

 

Collins Reference, 1999

SARI BASHI, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ~

 

      Democracy Now!

     October 17, 2023

CARLA BLEY ~

 

C A R L A    B L E Y

1936 ~ 2023

THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH ~

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth is definitely a wonder, quite a find, and actually a book I often wondered was anyone capable of writing — centering around Robert Dunn, who I believe once upon a time sent me poems as submission. A highly curious book that works against all odds being a biography of an essentially street poet in back bay old Portsmouth, N.H., who the author signs onto, much to her own surprise (and ours), gaining an excellent book size portrait of a 'nobody’. This isn’t supposed to work in big-name-poet America, but it does, searching into that interior existence far from the maddening crowd. This is where I believe actual life lives, rather than the hubbub that drives existence, and so few have the opportunity to ever feel or see this revealed.  More interesting than Dunn is the book itself which seems a combined effort of the author’s eye and compassion, Dunn being available, and even the publisher (Counterpoint) taking on the project.

[ BA ]

  Counterpoint, 2017

.