1 2 E S S E N T I A L A L B U M S
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
SANDRA LIM
The Mountain Top
In truth, you still expect to order your life
in peace; you continue to long for glamour and passion.
To guard against the destiny
you don't really know, you work furiously.
Pensive and unathletic as you are, you have
your own intricate schedule,
with your shopping bags and appointments.
You always forget you're a bag of blood.
In sleep, these things lose
their power over you.
Meaninglessness does to you
what it can. When you wake, you have no ideas;
the heart is momentarily light.
As you slip back in the days, you find
you haven't done with certain notions yet.
You read all the time, help yourself to a plate of oysters.
The dreams become fresh and astounding once more,
renewed by the drama of betrayal.
Even the self you take to be so real
falls away while you labor,
and the only stones left are the ones in your throat,
forgone things you have to get down fast
or else you'll choke. At last, you don't even know
what you feel for yourself.
The mountaintop: you can keep your books
and your music there. What's bad in one story
is good in another. Something has made you brave.
There is more to life than writing.
Chicago
I had a little stove, and a wick of wakefulness
in my sleep.
In the mornings, I heard the train roar and go up
into the center of things.
I circulated thoughts like,
I will always be restless for crowds and lights and noise.
I would take long walks and say to no one,
When I was first married. . .
I saw all of Luis Bunuel's films inside of a week:
the darkness was delicious. I could always almost smell it
I wasn't young, I wasn't old, I was still nibbling
at what lay before me.
And later, when I didn't have the energy to wait out the days
made unlike only by fact of the seasons,
I planned a few things, too.
Boston
When I first moved to this city to take a job,
and the snows began to fall, a slow sadness took hold of me.
Someone left a tiny pencil drawing of a sailboat
on the ceiling of my bedroom, and I would stare up at it each night,
thinking that it would eventually stir.
I met someone that first spring, and I didn't love him.
But I very much wanted someone to look at me,
in all my youth and feminine momentum.
Endings
The story has two endings.
It has one ending
and then another.
Do you hear me?
I do not have the heart
to edit the other out.
_______________
Sandra Lim
The Curious Thing
Norton 2021
Monday, May 25, 2026
HOW TO DISAPPEAR AND WHY ~
A wonderful read —
I knew how the great Richard Farnsworth left the body
but not quite that it didn't work quite right. Minor doesn't,
out of respect, mention his name. When I read large portions
of the book out loud to Sweetheart, after a few of these sessions
she finally said, "Who is this guy?" Maybe the best line in the
film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but women
said it first.
[BA]
Sarabande Books
2026
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Friday, May 22, 2026
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
DEREK JARMAN, A FINGER IN THE FISHES MOUTH ~
SIX PAGES I
I dropped six pages of the Sunday newspaper
At the edge of the field
and the wind blew away
Kings, princesses, whole
Countries, one presidential
election, and several
eminent letter writers
__________________________
Derek Jarman
A Finger in the Fishes Mouth
House Sparrow Press, 2024
First published 1972, Bettiscombe Press, Dorset, UK
Monday, May 18, 2026
MILO De ANGELIS ~
Form
The mystery of what another man
sees
at the fall of a dress
separate sense
from the name "stefania."
Assassins
Where the move
to be here demands an undiscoverable
choice, sacred wait, season:
the shadows, in the listening,
at the edges of the face
stop in the solemnity
dividing dagger
from act.
Neither Point Nor Line
Like the drop, on the leaf, after the storm
only for the second time
he never knew anymore
because he wanted to be precise
till death
light zen, in the field,
the force that held the birds in flight
(an interruption and they would fall)
becomes the hell of counting them.
And The the Water
In the harvest too
the body was only lent
because it wanted to become
innocent in the end
and running
it didn't renounce
an anthology of gestures
the slender body
entering the princess's room
to love the first time.
Now she is unadorned
Now she is unadorned
and the years come to pass, in handfuls,
with the wit of shears and
an arrogance that draws
to the gas the mouth
persistent down to the spine
where it believes
or else the dead trudge toward a field
with a hollow head
and the myriads
hurl themselves into the baptism
for a breath.
_________________________
Milo De Angelis
Finite Intuition
Selected Poetry and Prose
Sun and Moon Press, 1995
Sunday, May 17, 2026
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (Catonsville Nine) ~
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Marjoie and Thomas Melville, Tom Lewis, John Hogan, David Darcy, Mary Moylan and George Mische walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Friday, May 15, 2026
GERARD DE NERVAL~
April
And now the dust and the fine days,
An azure sky and walls ablaze
With burning light, long nights, no breeze,
And nothing green; a ruddy shine
Just barely stains, like a red wine,
The black branches of the large trees.
Upon me this fine weather weighs.
Only after long rainy days
Should spring then come, Nature's daughter,
Turning rosy and turning green,
Like a blooming nymph in a scene
Who, smiling, springs from the water.
__________________________
Gerard de Nerval
Little Castles of Bohemia
translated by Napoleon Jeffries
Wakefield Press 2025
Thursday, May 14, 2026
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Monday, May 11, 2026
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALLEN GINSBERG, YOU'RE 100! ~
MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026, 7:00 PM PST
Kronos Quartet with Poets performing Howl and other poems
Price: $45.00 (Registration Required)
The Kronos Quartet is joined by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, Andy Cabic of Vetiver, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Oliver Ray & No Land, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Coyote, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Dominique DiPrima, Brontez Purnell and Eleni Sikelianos to celebrate HOWL and Allen Ginsberg’s 100th Birthday.
Join us for an intimate evening of poetry and music celebrating Allen Ginsberg’s Centennial and the 70th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems,featuring Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, Andy Cabic of Vetiver, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Oliver Ray & No Land, Kim Stanley Robinson, Peter Coyote, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Dominique DiPrima, Brontez Purnell and Eleni Sikelianos, culminating in a rare performance of Kronos Quartet’s Howl.
Curated and produced by Peter Hale and Jesse Goodman, in collaboration with the Allen Ginsberg Estate and (((folkYEAH!))).
Part of the Ginsberg Centennial, a global program of events across poetry, music, film, and performance.
Purchase tickets HERE
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Friday, May 8, 2026
GARY SNYDER "OIL" ~
Oil
soft rainsqualls on the swells
south of the Bonins, late at night. Light
from the empty mess-hall
throws back bulky shadows
of winch and fairlead
over the slanting fantail where I stand.
but for men on watch in the engine room,
the man at the wheel, the lookout in the bow,
the crew sleeps. in cots on deck
or narrow iron bunks down drumming
passageways below.
the ship burns with a furnace heart
steam veins and copper nerves
quivers and slightly twists and always goes —
easy roll of the hull and deep
vibration of the turbine underfoot.
bearing what all these
crazed, hooked nations need:
steel plates and
long injections of pure oil.
___________________________
Gary Snyder
The Back Country
Fulcrum Press, 1967
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ~ GARY SNYDER
Thursday, May 7, 2026
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