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

.  

MEMORY FOR FORGETFULNESS ~

AN  ESSENTIAL  BOOK  TO  READ  RIGHT  NOW

University of California Press

REDACTION ~

 

L I S T E N

Norton

2019

THE FIVE KEYS ~