New Year Paintings and Poetry

New Year Paintings and Poetry

So, another year, another variant, and we trudge on across the tundra. Courage, creativity, and, yes, peace, love, and understanding are needed now more than . . . Well, they’re needed. In that spirit of hopeful trudging, Spinozablue offers new literature, literary criticism, and home-brewed paintings.

Robert Mueller brings us his unique take on Petrarch, and David Groulx gets obliquely iambic. It looks like we’re off to a solid start.

I had a stretch there with at least two kinds of artistic blockage: writing and imaging. A dearth of imagination, perhaps, inhibiting both. But recent days have seen the breaking up of the dam — at least this is how I choose to see it. So it’s flowing now. Not unbridled, but safely making its way between at least two shores.… Click to Continue “New Year Paintings and Poetry”

The Marketeer’s Lament

The Marketeer’s Lament

Labyrinths are not your friends, by Douglas Pinson Digital painting, 2021.

The lies

The lies they spread
Have become their truth

     I know the pain of such things
As I once stood among them

Bleeding out
Spiraling out

     Trying to fathom
What once was mine

Failing to grow back
To the center

     Yes — the center of all things

Too much to handle so I’m gone
For now and always

Unless

     Unless the last tree
Stands against the last wind

And there is more time
For Sapiens to merge

With their good fictions
Against their bad confabs

With their bright legends
Against their terminal myths

     I know the pain of that fight too

Yesterday
     Before I died
I wrote the book on it all
Propaganda pays for a while

Until it doesn’t

 

— by Douglas Pinson

David Groulx’s Wrathful Day

David Groulx’s Wrathful Day

Dies Irae

day of wrath

Sunday morning listen to civilizations mechanical Cartesian rhythms
of

the coffee bean came from poverty-stricken Columbia
milk from a bovine destined for slaughter
no sugar

life is sweet enough.

I know a song that has no beats, no rhythms
and no sounds

haunting echoes of the universal
emptiness

all my strophes and all my chorus
un-stood

tenor, symbol, metaphor

when it’s structural, it’s all you can do

to taste the acid the song goes roar

I am iambic pentameter who you always bring back because you don’t have enough
money to live in Montreal
or the moon.

I am the only thing right with the world
I am a natural desire
natural man-flesh
I vibrate to the low frequencies
touch the high ones too
I am the pure DNA between flesh and God

I am an ox
turning.… Click to Continue “David Groulx’s Wrathful Day”

Robert Mueller and Petrarcan Mirrors

Robert Mueller and Petrarcan Mirrors

Petrarcan Naissance

by Robert Mueller

Here is a poem from the great sequence of poetry using the native Italian tongue, instead of being written in Latin, by Francesco Petrarca and covering much of a life lived during the 14th century. Readers will know him as Petrarch. The time he lived is important to the extent he is regarded as a proto-Renaissance-humanist and well ahead of his time. The later developments emphasizing human autonomy are already in evidence in Petrarca’s poetry, and it is intriguing how individual accomplishments may fit into the mold. The nature of what Petrarca titles the writing of fragments in and about the vernacular (rerum vulgarium fragmenta) may be understood as a writing that comes piecemeal. The scenes and the thoughts that bear upon them relate to an experience born of recurring possibilities that are not confined to a single shape and pattern.… Click to Continue “Robert Mueller and Petrarcan Mirrors”

Helgoland: Quantum islands in the storm

Helgoland: Quantum islands in the storm

One could quip, “I must have missed that day,” when it comes to a subject or two during high school. Senior year, especially. I was absent physically more than was wise, and even when I did attend math and science classes, my thoughts were often somewhere else. With the sun, the waves, the girls on the beach, or some day-dream about heroic feats in sports, the arts, or racing old cars that had no business being on Thunder Road to begin with. Not unusual for a teen, I suppose — to think life is elsewhere. But there are limits to our wanderings, and contexts and timelines to consider, or so I’m told. 

Centuries later, books lead to other books in rapid order, and the quantum world appears.… Click to Continue “Helgoland: Quantum islands in the storm”

Avery Tuck’s Liminal Permanence

Avery Tuck’s Liminal Permanence

Liminal Permanence

polar nights
bring
magnetic sparrows
in flux

 

ephemeral ruins
of
known faces—
pulled from transience
to
reminisce

 

a hemlock
dances
in purgatory—
to tune,
a congregation
preaches its
innocence

 

— by Avery Tuck

Copyright ©2021, by Avery Tuck. All Rights Reserved.

Avery Tuck is an amateur poet from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that much of what we’ve been taught about “human nature” is nonsense. We’ve been told for far too long that we’re naturally selfish, greedy, and violent, and there’s just no point in trying to change the world around us. Suggest a better system, one structured to encourage cooperation, sharing, giving, and living in peace, and all too many cynics will laugh and instantly claim it can’t work — because, “human nature.”

Thing is, recent science tells us that our nature is very well suited for just such a society — one that utilizes our natural tendencies toward helping one another, sharing, cooperating, and preferring peace to war. Recent anthropology, archaeology, and other social and natural sciences have also shown that we humans survived to this point largely through cooperation, not competition, not “the survival of the fittest.”… Click to Continue “Rutger Bregman’s Humankind”

John Grey’s Morning Toast: Two Poems

John Grey’s Morning Toast: Two Poems

MORNING TOAST

Waiting for the toast to be done.
Pouring coffee into a cup.
Morning dew like angel’s spit.
The sun – a critic who loves everything
it lights upon.
Apron of blue jays.
Sparrows suddenly on song.

The breeze.
The orange on the sill.
A game of solitaire not yet started.
Red queen on black king
sings the voice in your head.
Open the window.
Artificial pine scent meets the real thing.

Fish in the bowl
fed by fingers.
Mourning dove takes a dip in the bird bath.
Dandelions open-faced,
glad to steal the grass’s thunder.

The mirror.
Not bad for…
how many years is it?
Mind awakening.
Slippers still asleep on your feet.

Some things it might interest you to know.
Others oblivious.
Bright hazy windows.… Click to Continue “John Grey’s Morning Toast: Two Poems”

Mitch Corber: Three Poems

Mitch Corber: Three Poems

Eclair of the Heart

a man overcome with emotion cannot gloam
     or gloom his way home …

a snail occupied by a whale cannot prove
     nor dispoverish a dish of sardines …

a sack on a madman’s head serves as a hat
     dashed by the drive of who’ll keep him alive …

a doom served up by a saucer of milk heals
     the welcome of wolves at his doubled
     doorway to stay the night heaved by the blitz
     of battleshod crumbs at the dumbwaiter’s
     beck and call …

a posse of weak-kneed jehosophats splats
     head-on with the long grin of one who
     knows the most is missing from his puzzled
     periphery…

“gotcha!” – get me closer to the gotten
     of godspeak as the freak pries back
     his laughing garb to lodge a complaint
     at the ain’t-been-there-yet …

no solvent nor kosher dill whistle will fill
     you up like an eclair of the heart …

 

Sauna of Soothing Blues

The drunken dice pursue their final tumble
in the first of many tosses

What’s left is a past a paste of former selves
in the groaning dog days of irrelevancy

These weeks of rewind sure stymie a spring-forward
doorway through the clues of an isolating loop-de-loop

The gift of a peapod knocks at the guarded gate
in a Sauna of Soothing Blues

Prosy rosettes pose a wetness a shrewd meander
a coy coriander dipped in the inner inkwell

Spontaneous nerves in a slow syrup – the gaining
of eclectic touch in the much that there is

 

Vodka Victims

Vodka victims avoid the ovary
melancholy of wallet-sized apologies

When seven rolls a tollgate of telltale felons
in a flash of uppity passion
I string the ring of pithy possibilities
in penniless squirts of action

Votive channels waver in the windy scheme
a thing of barely the brass knuckles
on his fingers

— by Mitch Corber

Copyright© 2021, by Mitch Corber.… Click to Continue “Mitch Corber: Three Poems”

Bedazzled Humans, Dark City, and New Paintings

Bedazzled Humans, Dark City, and New Paintings

Just watched “Dark City” again, one of my favorite movies, ever. It’s been a while since my last viewing. More than a decade, in fact. Unfortunately, the version I watched wasn’t the remastered DVD version I had seen back in 2009, which had provoked this review in Spinozablue many moons ago.

It was still excellent, but just not as amazing as the extended version. It moved me, and reminded me that we’re creatures of the light, whether we live in darkness or not, and some of us live too much in that darkness.

The ancient, divinely obdurate sun. The blue surrounding that sun. Reflections of that light dancing on the water in myriad forms. The hope of seeing those colors up close, the desperate longing for that warmth.… Click to Continue “Bedazzled Humans, Dark City, and New Paintings”