I always feel the
thing to go for
is speed.
P.G. Wodehouse
Interview with Gerald Clarke
Paris Review©
The Art of Fiction No. 60
Winter, 1975
iii Hermès, 2012©
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Friday, March 14, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Once a hobbledehoy
..
and just as our way is flat across
Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil
Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
We both come to see distance as something unofficial
And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
..
Only the wait in stations is vague and
Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there's no
Rule or that it's applied haphazardly.
Right in the middle of a
stately, searching poem,
one will feel release to
laugh where the phrasing
or the tempo says, "OK."
Is this because, we know
a poem wants more of us,
and is a merry vengeance
part of what it expects?
I honestly happen to be-
lieve, thinking strictly
as a rower, such release
is the finer moment of a
blade's recurring sweep.
In the assimilation of a
new work of sound, more-
over, it's irrepressible
to pursue its adaptation
to one's own conditions,
adventurously to own it,
even as its autonomy re-
veals itself. Poetry has
it easy, and yet nothing
else can have it harder.
What one can envy in the
poet, is that he's where
we like to be, composing
invitations to his home.
That needs gorgeousness.
Ah, where is it, for me,
except inside a rule ap-
plied haphazardly?
In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great
White apples, might I just through proximity and aping
Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine
To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,
That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within
My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last
Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means
Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions
of home?
Houseboat Days
Melodic Trains
[fragment]
op. cit.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Come up, Southern Cross
News is of New Zealand
reconsidering the flag
again, the famous uni-
on jack in the canton,
stars of that southern
cross on the fly, out-
lined white over blue.
For young people in
wine there remain 2
paradises, and both
of great linkage to
the seas. I hear, a
Prime Minister fav-
ours a silver fern,
on a black field. I
don't see paradise,
in obscure foliage,
much less radiance.
What is a country for,
I often wonder, if not
the fulfillment of the
patience of its stars?
Monday, March 10, 2014
They took an hour from my weekend
they said I'd
see it again,
all the while
pretending to
keep it safe.
i Hedi Slimane
