Two Ensigns of Poignancy from 1918

- Kurt Schwitters


The Great Lament Of My Obscurity Three

where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica
mad : the zigzags crack
telephone
bite the rigging liquefy
the arc
climb
astral
memory
towards the north through its double fruit
like raw flesh
hunger fire blood

- Tristan Tzara

Veiled Morning-light

Lightform Cut By Rusted-Out Metal Wall

Small Tower of Light Lozenges

I hear a saxophone, through a portable stereo, playing a sleepy, sweet version of Edelweiss

I hear a rotary saw cutting plywood, plus more distant hammer shots

I hear semi-rhythmic thawnks of a tennis ball and

I hear the happy slow swirls of jet-roar tracking overhead.

Sin Sobre

NO ENVELOPE

Today, I mistyped
candid
as
candied.

Shadow-Play

Scrutability

When and in how many ways does your voice crack?

Offfen enufff, and these ways:
in self-same concentric or spiraling patterns,
in wounded-knee creases,
in glottalized guttural graphemes,
in M-dashes, chopped 'n' screwed,
in "Voice of the Nature" is my ringtone,
in as-is so-and-so,
in a cold, dry smattering,
in newly illumined minus-signage.
.................

(An italicized hyphen hissed,
revolted, forsook its place

& ligature duties---
it lung'd out at me.

Now, we've a little glare
lodged snugly against

the underside of our upper-
left cranial plate.)

N=A=T=U=R=E

Re: The Moon

Joseph Conte on ROBERT DUNCAN:
"The moon does not become a fixed symbol with limited relations but as a sign enters a limitless network of associations...The moon moves bodies of water, it moves the bodies of the lovers in their nocturnal embraces, and it moves 'the body of the poem, aroused' (Duncan, BB 19)."

MINA LOY
"Lunar Baedeker"

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

...
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

LAURA RIDING:
"If, for instance, I say 'the sun which multiplied' or 'the moon which singled,' as I do in one poem, I am endeavoring to indicate actualities of physical circumstance in which our inner crucialities of human circumstance are set. My moon may look like an old tired poetical symbol, and I like an old tired romanticist, but I truly meant that the moon's being what it is where it is intervenes in our outer circumstances as a negator of the sun's fostering excessivenss in our regard, both lush and destructive---as a tempering counter-agency, relatively little but near. However foolishly mystical this may seem, nothing so far learned by scientists or experienced by astronauts disproves this."

WALLACE STEVENS:
from "The Man in the Dump"

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.


JACK SPICER:

Moon,
...........cantilever of sylabbles
If it were spelled "mune" it would not cause madness.
...

"I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddently covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem---a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger."


RAE ARMANTROUT:
"View"

Not the city lights. We want

-the moon-

.....................The Moon
None of our own doing!

Domestic Abstraction

SOIE-disant:

to speak oneself into silken, tissue-paper existence---

manifold, flowy, translucent,
creased and/or crushed,
fragile, resilient---

by means of a language, a poetics,
for which the same modifiers obtain.

Truth 'n' Advertising

Signature Extras

"Every Piece Was His Favorite"
(Whetted drapes, no song, an empire waist.)

"Lost Sea Adventure"
(The ramifications of a radically indeterminate
universe, a materialism of noncoincidence.)

"Anecdotal Evidence of Homesick Mankind"
("...an angel hovers above
her pubic bone, and an eye stares out
from one shoulder---")

"In a Gilded World, Theirs Is But to Quip and Sigh"
(Incorrigible, inexorable, incurable: what delicious words.
I find them fatally true, of me and much.)
...

I'm a nervy angler, an abortive
pugilist: dull-barbed,
hamfisted; a dusty drone
with elan, devious, dervishy; swollen-
tongued communicant,
formalist makeshifter.

I'ma nnvh:
hvvy brvvng.

"Enchantment in a Race Against the Clock"

("Limber fingers" makes an exquisite trochaic two-step.)

On any relatively flat surface
a four-legged stool will always
wobble, if only the tiniest bit, but
a three-legged stool will be
perfectly, unimpeachably stable.

Man's great affliction, which begins in infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.
...
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.

- Simone Weil

Every threshold was cool-grimed
marble---our light green

stunt, our light
blue balooning. There stooped---

whereupon, wrenched---

a cornered tree. If surnames'd
been found pinned

to that that that.

Thus glossy green
resounds off blue marble leavings.

Charles Burchfield, 'The Insect Chorus' (1917)

Rhythms

John Harkey is the CEO of Consolidated Restaurant Companies. He served with Arthur Simon on the Special Committee to negotiate the deal with MHR.

John Harkey is an avid outdoor adventurer who enjoys physical challenges. His exploits started in 1997 when he scaled Washington state's Mount Rainier, which is considered the most extreme endurance ice climb in the United States. That same year, he competed in the auto racing World Challenge series at Sears Point in Sonoma, Calif.

John Harkey is an aspiring free lance sports journalist specializing in football-related news and events.

"I've worked closely with John Cracken and John Harkey, and I've come to trust their judgment in evaluating companies. They are very thorough in the conduct of due diligence and creative in structuring a win-win transaction for all involved."

From teen to man, restauranteur John Harkey has channeled the energy of an entrepreneur.
...
STEPHENSON, Augustus A. "Gus" (killed by John Harkey).
HARKEY, John A. (killed by "Gus" Augustus Stephenson).

Domestic Abstraction

Coronal Mass Ejection

There was a "viscous, colloidal fog" that temporarily
took the form of a garden.
There were 30 seconds of weightlessness.
There was a burst of light and wind; later, all that remained was
"a mountain of disjointed facts that strain credulity."
(The austral summer is 5 months of no nighttime.)
Someone said "shame will save humanity."

..........
Each was coming from and headed towards something.

The question 'where are we?' is deferred, withheld, for several days.

Each, together, is reading & manipulating signs & objects, always in the shadow of a heaving, menacing thing: force or being.

Each cuts a certain figure socially, appears to be a certain type of person; the signs they present and produce are read according to the nearest familiar type connoted, and then further experiences (additional signs) modify this initial reading---overturn it, refine it, complicate it, and/or cement it.

Each must relive the event via the intensely subjective memory of catastrophe that is lodged like shrapnel in the mind.

Reading Test With White Letterforms on Black Grounds

Stills