Flotsam

May 19

“Both [Melkor and Aule], also, desired to make things of their own that should be new and unthought of by others, and delighted in the praise of their skill. But Aulë remained faithful to Eru and submitted all that he did to his will; and he did not envy the works of others, but sought and gave counsel. Whereas Melkor spent his spirit in envy and hate, until at last he could make nothing save in mockery of the thought of others, and all their works he destroyed if he could.” The Silmarillion

May 1

“

Since the papal crackdown on nuns, they have received an outpouring of support…Sister Joan Chittister, a prominent Benedictine nun, said she had worried at first that nuns spend so much time with the poor that they would have no allies. She added that the flood of support had left her breathless.

“It’s stunningly wonderful,” she said. “You see generations of laypeople who know where the sisters are — in the streets, in the soup kitchens, anywhere where there’s pain. They’re with the dying, with the sick, and people know it.”

Sister Joan spoke to me from a ghetto in Erie, Pa., where her order of 120 nuns runs a soup kitchen, a huge food pantry, an afterschool program, and one of the largest education programs for the unemployed in the state.

” Nicholas D Kristof, in the NYT

Apr 19

Angels

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college
one winter, hauling a load of Herefords
from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of
Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser
Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end
of his semi gliding around in the side mirror
as he hit ice and knew he would never live
to see graduation or the castle at Duino.

In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift
(the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he said
four flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings
spread so wide he couldn’t see, and then
the world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask
around. Little Bill and I sang Your Cheatin’
Heart and laughed, and then a sudden quiet
put a hard edge on the morning and we left.

Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive, he said,
leaping down the hospital steps. The nurses
waved, white dresses puffed out like pigeons
in the morning breeze. We roared off in my Dodge,
Behold, I come like a thief! he shouted to the town
and gave his life to poetry. He lives, now,
in the south of France. His poems arrive
by mail, and we read them and do not understand.

—B H Fairchild

Still can’t believe I get to take this guy’s workshop in the fall.

Apr 17

“I have a strong feeling that my intellectual formation is just as much a hindrance as a help to prayer.” Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

Apr 16

“

Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, ‘All right, that’s the third time we’ve had enough of Mr. Stevens.’ So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, ‘By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I’d knock him out with a single punch.’

“So who should show up but poor old Papa and Mr. Stevens swung that same fabled punch but fertunatly missed and I knocked all of him down several times and gave him a good beating. Only trouble was that first three times put him down I still had my glasses on. Then took them off at the insistence of the judge who wanted to see a good clean fight without glasses in it and after I took them off Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn’t harm my jaw at all and so put him down again and then fixed him good so he was in his room for five days with a nurse and Dr. working on him. But you mustn’t tell this to anybody.”

“Anyway last night Mr. Stevens comes over to make up and we are made up. But on mature reflection I don’t know anybody needed to be hit worse than Mr. S. Was very pleased last night to see how large Mr. Stevens was and am sure that if I had had a good look at him before it all started would not have felt up to hitting him. But can assure you that there is no one like Mr. Stevens to go down in a spectacular fashion especially into a large puddle of water in the street in front of your old Waddel Street home where all took place. … I think he is really one of those mirror fighters who swells his muscles and practices lethal punches in the bathroom while he hates his betters.

” Ernest Hemingway’s account of his fistfight with Wallace Stevens (from a letter, February 1936)

Poetry is a Destructive Force

That’s what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast
Its muscles are his own…

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

-Wallace Stevens

“Many people are drawn to academic life because they expect it will provide a refuge from the social demands of other careers: They believe one can be valued as a studious introvert, as many undergraduates are. But academe is a profession of opposites. Long periods of social isolation—research and writing—are punctuated by brief periods of intense social engagement: job interviews, teaching, conferences, and meetings. One reason that completion rates for graduate programs are so low—and unhappiness levels so high—is, I suspect, because students are not selected for the full range of aptitudes they will need to be successful in graduate school. And there are few if any supports in place for those students who struggle with the extremes of introversion and extroversion that academe demands.” Screening Out the Introverts - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via ayjay)

Apr 2

“Love is Strange” (Badlands)

Mar 29

Anais Mitchell- “Coming Down”

Mar 27

Whale Poem

The deep to be hoary: In the 19^th Century, most of the whaling industry was centered around Nantucket Island, whose population were pacifists. Men would leave home for whale hunts for a year or more while women would run the island in their egalitarian society. In the sperm whale populations they were hunting, male whales hunt several miles deep, while the female remain in large groups, and run their society.

The light is oceanic green, and makes hexagonic

light on the platform, with claws and gewgaws of light.

Each side of the monolith forms a point,

and when the moon shines coldly

from the cowl of space (a bell, liquid, as sound expands

and gets thicker in the sea).

Now a sea song

[Amazing Grace, traditional]:

Descending like a cork on her waves

Floating on her water wall?

Although the darkness made us slaves

To the moon’s arresting call.

I could not break from its cold grasp

So bound our paths would be

Each drifting sound her liquid bell

Made us the whale-dense sea.

Each bottle fell to the sailors’ bones;

A house on the oceans’ floor

And inside her bricks which opened there

I saw a rising velvet door.

A grove of spikes: When the Quaker hunter

espoused nonviolence, and stuffed his musket,

sharpened his hook, with its long sisal

and hemp rope, into a puffing heart

bigger than an oat-fed baby, he turned

in the dewlight like a battering ram.

True intoxication gurgled up in a thermos

of adventure. They’d go out from Massachusetts for years.

They were looking,

but their prey were listening.

A sperm whale’s ear is bigger

than a fist and it hears twofold noises:

the telescopic part hears squawks.

The enlarging cathedral part

hears echolocation.

Squawk—related to the whortleberry.

Correction…a hoarse squall, never from a horse.

Sometimes known as night heron, with a creak,

a screech, a ghost eating caviar.

Utter like a public-address system,

like a bimaculated duck, with windup gears.

Next to the inflatable balloons, there’s the echolocation.

(See under: bat versus manmade devices)

Radio signals sent and reflected back,

from the altimeter to the moth. (See under:

torpedo guidance, silent films, Buster Keaton doing marimba)

Concealed in space: Spermaceti whale males

dive 3,936 feet. Females dive to at least 3,280 feet.

They dive for over an hour. Squid beaks are inside

the stomachs. Picture a gray rose bigger

than a transcendentalist’s room up in the eaves, like a matrix

echoing its math-maze of osmotics.

Dr. Johnson, in the 1755 Dictionary:

A network is any thing reticulated or decussated,

at equal distances, with interstices

between the intersections.

That’s why the image of wooden networks

banging a reggae less a private ventricle

than sound immemorial to the order of air,

is a membrane gliding like soapstone

to bodies minced has sixty times’ air’s

intensity! And it’s all underwater: a blue ghost

sucking the fieldfare of smoke: Blueaproned, bluetrampled, bluemantled,

and blueglimmering home.

Flotsam

flot·sam/ˈflätsəm/Noun 1. Wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk. 2. Floating refuse or debris. 3. Discarded odds and ends.

Angels

Poetry is a Destructive Force

flot·sam/ˈflätsəm/Noun
1. Wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk.
2. Floating refuse or debris.
3. Discarded odds and ends.