(Untitled,Face and Rectangular Box - 2012)
.
(hall road)
persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,
excavating tunnels, drilling silences,
insisting, running under my pillow,
brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids
with another, intangible skin made of air,
its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes
migrate through the provinces of my body,
it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,
slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,
climbs the nape of my neck,
turns and turns in my skull,
wanders across the terrace of my forehead,
conjures visions, scatters them,
erases my thoughts one by one
with hands of unwetting water,
it evaporates them,
black surge, tide of pulse-beats,
murmur of water groping forward
repeating the same meaningless syllable,
I hear its sleepwalking delirium
losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,
it comes back, drifts off, comes back,
endlessly flings itself
off the edges of my cliffs,
and I don’t stop falling
and I fall
—Octavio Paz, from “Soliloquy”
Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Art Credit Vishal Marapon
The Opposite Of Diary. (part one)
.
I wonder if. Ok I don’t, or rather I do, only more often than not, images get in the way and before I know it, snow resembles a face and I’m wondering in a past tense, closely followed by and including everything else, why sheep don’t walk backwards. That gets in the way of any coherent thought I may have, or any real question I may choose to try and think about. Tomorrow I may actually find out if I’m going to get old one day, or should I say older, or, whether, this next year will feel very different indeed and short. Actually that’s not true, I meant Wednesday and anyway I prefer goats to sheep and the infrequent nature of gathered time -
there are things in forty two years I’ve come to know:
one is the smell of paint. I can tell almost any type of paint by its smell alone. This for some reason pleases me.
two is it could have been,
with the shape of a road, late
and to the left,
or Purcell in a subway
describing the violence of insipid colour
blooding the young as they grew,
or as one winged gate
brought Rosa’s paper from the depth of her river:
the blackest of earrings
meant coming back -
London misspelled
each parallel name for an open sound,
dredged from Berlin,
and its clue
was re-lighting
the same cigarette, one way
and then not.
.
(hall road)
Toast For Tea
.
Firstly, if we accept the course
of everything flammable, tinder dry
as opposed to the render
on an unburnable building, we should or must
draw into both lungs
an excitable bust of marble and tone
with sounds paddled and defenceless.
Leon! he shouted, you bruise me
with your gibberish, your shirty disease
ruinous in track and puddle.
Secondly, we refuse to count mountains
for fear is an attic, on all four sides
another three weaken
and this my friend is an apple.
Leon? his voice had lowered
to rest in sympathy. Your feet, he said,
are made of twattish sofas.
(hall road)
My Sun
.
last night i spent
3 days with 9 soldiers killing villagers,
i stepped on the sound,
on a gentle docile moon
and heard everything.
i stopped smoking, gave in
to the pain in my side,
the answer with a sea, the cool
of each empty crest, your noises
and heard nothing.
.
(hall road)
Alex Clare - Too Close (Live Unplugged) (by alexclare)
POETRYEATER: from Barbara Hamby, "Delirium"
I wake up in the kitchen, lying on a wooden bench,
with you and the waiter staring at me.
“I’m fine,” I say, though it’s as if I’m pulling
my mind up from a deep well.
The waiter brings me a bowl of soup,
which I don’t want, but it doesn’t matter because
the lights go out and a man at the next…
!!!
“The material is never wrong,” he said. “It’s only me that can be wrong.”
Apart from Picasso and Duchamp, no modern artist has influenced the course of art more widely or more deeply than Rauschenberg. The vast outpouring of his work in all media - paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, live performance, stage and costume design - opened the way into new territories which have been and are still being colonized by generations of younger artists, some of whom may be unaware of their debt to him. Looking back, though, I wonder how many of them really subscribe to the key premise that guided his work - the unending struggle to subvert or outwit the controlling ego. “I don’t want a painting to be just an expression of my personality,” Bob had said, early on. “I feel it ought to be much better than that.” […] this lifelong struggle to transcend the mind’s control gave his art its invigorating tension between chaos and order, and its ability to make us see the world around us in new and surprising ways.
He wanted to be unfamiliar with what he was doing. This was one of the things he admired about the choreography of Merce Cunningham. For several years, Bob traveled with the Cunningham company as its resident lighting and costume designer. He loved sharing the situation of the dancers, for whom each performance was unique and impermanent. “I feel close to that situation in my own work,” he told me. “I always want to put off the final fixing of a painting as long as possible, but of course, you can’t. Once it’s done, it’s done.” John Cage, who came closer than anyone to being a mentor in Bob’s life, took another view. Cage’s 1961 essay, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” contains this sentence: “Over and over again I’ve found it impossible to memorize Rauschenberg’s paintings. I keep asking, ‘Have you changed it?’ And then noticing while I’m looking it changes.”
(via jesuisperdu)
One for the existentialists…
Nov. 7, 1913 is the date of birth of French writer and Nobel Laureate, Albert Camus. Born in Algeria, Camus originally studied at (and played soccer for) the University of Algiers. However tuberculosis set back the completion of his degree (and killed his goalkeeping career), but eventually he completed his philosophy studies and relocated to Paris.
In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times…”
“Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath are very different kinds of New York artists—Amy a modern-day action painter, Tom a new breed of realist—who share an ontological approach to the problem of pictorial staging: What is this thing I am making, they ask, and how can it be said to ‘represent’ anything other than itself”
Blue poles (well?) on the beach
in a snowless winter and
I’m too cold to ask you
why we’re here but of course “we are”
where on the puzzled reef dwarves either
fish or drown in the abandoned ship
sharks dissever year-old children in search
of “young blood”Jersey acting like Europe
in an instant and lovely Mary kneeling along the quick tide
to be anxious with thoughts of bare oceans
that move as the thighs of an “eventual” sunlight
like bathers moving closer to their season
when again gulls perch in their lovely confusion
“alone,” as now, the sand sifting through
our fingers like another’s darkness. It’s true,
you are always too near and I am everything
that comes moaning free and wet
through the lips of our lovely grind
—Jim Carroll, “Poem”
Art Credit Mike Apichella
“A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.” —Robert Graves
Portrait by Mati Klarwei.
