What I like in this set of lines from Helen Guri Match is the code switching between the animal and the botanical. It adds to the effect of melding into a protean potentiality.
Darkness never came.
It was the bumblebees
and not the weeds
that went to seed eventually.
p. 69 – in the middle of the poem “Dandelions” here standing alone to signify an osmosis of sorts
And so for day 2461
08.09.2013
‘Neighbourhood Watch’
in The Cold Panes of Surfaces
One day you come home
to a letter in your mailbox.
It asks you to quietly observe
a neighbour — a young man
who owns a brick house
across the street from you.
[…]
you sit the whole long night
outside the poor man’s house,
[…]
slightly ashamed to be alone
rooting through his garbage, too,
looking for the secret writ to his life,
for what it is he is hiding — until,
empty-handed and solemn
you walk home, noticing someone
has trampled your rose bushes
and your garbage is strewn,
like a banner of lies and half-truths,
across the city’s shining ruin.
And so for day 2460
07.09.2013
Robert Graves
On English Poetry
(1922)
LV – The Art of Expression
[ends with the following charming anecdote of antithesis]
Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”
Being there. Soaking it in. Names are but touchstones to get back there.
And so for day 2459
06.09.2013
I think anybody who is impoverished in any way, either physically or psychically, tends to want to build rather than destroy.
David Wojnarowicz
p. 164
Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education
edited by Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur (1996)
[Incidently the volume presents a misspelling of the artist’s name in the table of contents:
David Wolnarowicz]
I have seen this misquoted:
I think anybody who is impoverished in any way, either physically or psychically, wants to build rather than destroy.
That “tends” is vital to the self-determination
And so for day 2458
05.09.2013
Intrigued by Neil Young’s use of the preposition “behind” in Helpless
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
And so I came across a stanza in Chris Banks’s “Sioux Lookout, Hwy. 9” in Bonfires
aurora borealis,
its green turbulence,
back-lit by stars
Still doesn’t resolve the mystery of the windows and stars but is another take on the light in the sky in Northern Ontario.
And so for day 2457
04.09.2013
Helen Guri
Match
Delectable opening of “After ‘Still Life Fast Moving'” — a most superb food fight albeit one served up as a slide show:
In some pictures, objects come alive
and the living are objects.
Picture, for example, a slide show of a food fight.
Sliced bologna is a rare bird whirling
past people grafted like vacant buildings.
A man turned jack-in-the-box
terrifies a peach pie into losing its lunch.
And when the cops appear like matching statues,
it is the tomatoes who confess.
The pictures come alive through words — it deserves noting — you almost forget that the depiction is framed within a framing.
And so for day 2456
03.09.2013
Brian Cullman
Helpless: On the Poetry of Neil Young
The Paris Review
October 23, 2012
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/23/fang-song-on-the-poetry-of-neil-young/
I forwarded the piece to my friend Bill Flicker, out in Los Angeles, who wrote back that he never listens to Neil Young’s words, that they are simply placeholders or crumbs that are scattered on a walk through a musical forest. Actually, I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative:
Blue blue windows behind the stars.
Yellow moon on the rise.
Purple words on a grey background
To be a woman and to be turned downHow did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. As for those purple words, they shine against the grey background much as Matisse’s goldfish shine through the water they swim in. I can see them clearly reflected on the surface of being turned down. Turned down like a bed, like a stereo, like a deal. A woman turned down. I can see that reflection even if I can’t explain it. If I could, the song might not be as powerful as it is.
Brian Cullman conflates two sets of lyrics: one from Helpless, the other from Cowgirl In The Sand.
Is there some other memory in the blue, blue windows and yellow stars of Helpless?
Van Gogh?
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79802
The Starry Night
Saint Rémy, June 1889
I got to see Starry Night Over the Rhone at the AGO lit by columns of light in parallel to the wall to which the canvas was affixed — giving the impression of a starlit avant-scene and thus enfolding the viewer into the scene
Mystical Landscapes: Masterpieces from Monet, Van Gogh and more
https://ago.ca/exhibitions/mystical-landscapes-masterpieces-monet-van-gogh-and-more
For a rest from all this ekphrasis, savour an auditory magical moment:
Whitehorse and Noah Gundersen perform Neil Young’s “Helpless.”
And so for day 2455
02.09.2013
I bought bones for soup and found them labelled as sugar bones.
My search as to the origin of the name netted no online explanation beyond an inkling of a Yiddish connection:
Tziker is Yiddish for sugar. You bought sugar bones, which in Yiddish refer to the softer edible parts of the bone.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/judaism/1459189-ask-jew-thread-323.html#ixzz5rhx5v7pk
So I took myself to the library. Nothing about sugar bones in Zushe Yosef Blech, Kosher Food Production. Nothing in Jews and their foodways edited by Anat Helman. Nothing in the Encyclopedia Judaica. Nor in a number of English-Yiddish dictionaries.
In passing I learnt that fish remains degrade so completely as not to be readable in the archeological record (Lior Weissbrod, Guy Bar-Oz “The butchering patterns of Gamla and Yodefat : beginning the search for kosher practices” in Behaviour behind bones : the zooarchaeology of ritual, religion, status and identity edited by Sharyn Jones O’Day, Wim Van Neer and Anton Ervynck).
Did find another related description: “spongy beef bones” referenced in the recipe collected by Edda Servi Machlin for Brodo della Feste in The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews.
Still hungry for that story …
And so for day 2454
01.09.2013
It’s a matter not just of having the tool at hand but also knowing what to do with the tool in the hand.
Jumper cables? You got jumper cables, buddy?”
“Yeah, sure. I got jumper cables.”
[…]
Men are supposed to know about jumper cables. It’s supposed to be in the genetic code, right? But some of us are mental mutants, and if it’s under the hood of a car, well it’s voodoo, Jack, and that’s the end of it.
Besides, this guy only asked me if I had jumper cables. He didn’t ask me if I knew how to use them.
Robert Fulghum
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
And so for day 2453
31.08.2013
From
Breadcraft
Charles and Violet Schafer
(San Francisco: Yerba Buena Press, 1974)
Ways of lobbying:
p. 13
Members of American Women Already Richly Endowed, opposing equal rights amendments for women, made gifts of homemade bread to influence Ohio legislators. They hoped the bread offerings would eclipse the mere carnations and valentines with which a militant women’s group was wooing the same lawmakers.
A Swiss Cabinet opened a weekly meeting with the announcement that a satisfied citizen had sent loaves of home baked bread to thank them for their services to the nation.
From Ecclesiastes 11:1 to Bread and Roses. (there’s a moving rendition of the song in the movie Pride).
And so for day 2452
30.08.2013
