Rainer Maria Rilke

Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity …
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us … To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth –
this is beyond undoing.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

courtesy whiskey river

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara

A Note On Negro Poetry (1918)

“I don’t even want to know that there were men before me” (Descartes), but some essential & simple laws, pathetic & muffled fermentation of a solid earth.

To fix on the point where the forces have accumulated, from whence the formulated sense springs, the invisible radiance of substance, the natural relation, but hidden and just, naively, without explanation.

To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities, subordinating nothing to them. Classification of the comic operas sanctioned by the aesthetic of accessories. (O, my drawer number ABSOLUTE.)

I abhor to enter a house where the balconies, the “ornaments”, are carefully stuck to the wall. Yet the sun, the stars continue to vibrate and hum freely in space, but I loathe to identify the explanatory hypotheses (asphyxiant probable) with the principle of life, activity, certainty.

The crocodile hatches the future life, rain falls for the vegetal silence, one isn’t a creator by analogy. The beauty of the satellites – the teaching of light – will satisfy us, for we are God only for the country of our knowledge, in the laws according to which we live experience on this earth, on both sides of our equator, inside our borders. Perfect example of the infinite we can control: the sphere.

To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities through personal decision and the unswerving firmness of sensibility, comprehension adequate to the matter transformed, close to the veins and rubbing against them in the pain for the present, definite joy. One creates an organism when the elements are ready for life. Poetry lives first of all for the functions of dance, religion, music and work.

— Translated by Pierre Joris

courtesy UBUweb

bp nichol online archive

bp nichol online archive
I’m so excited that York University has just launched the online archive of the late poet bp nichol.

via www.designboom.com

via www.designboom.com

Mark Strand

Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
… rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
… air? Why look for more?

II

And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures … why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep …
- Mark Strand Blizzard of One

courtesy whiskey river

Vito Acconci talks about poetry

Vito Acconci talks about poetry
ART TALK!  – VITO ACCONCI – Part 1 of 6 – VBS.TV

Osip Mandelstam

My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.

While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they’ve brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child’s supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.

To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It’s the age that rocks the swells
With humanity’s despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.

Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.

The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your single, fatal wound.

—Osip Mandelstam
The Age, translated by Marc Adler

courtesy wood s lot
http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/wood_s_lot.html

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

courtesy http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke

Today by Frank O’Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
—Frank O’Hara

courtesy Frank O’Hara.org – Poems

Days by Billy Collins

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.
- Billy Collins

courtesy whiskey river