And another fine day for wearing the green to you and yours. Here’s the official festival site in Ireland proper.
Spinozablue launched in 2008, and we noted this day that first year and most years since then. As is often the case, the first attempt was (perhaps) the best:
Tabhair ‘Om Póg, Is Éireannach Mé
New March poetry additions include B.J. Buckley, and Tony Brewer. Gray weather aside, it’s a fine day for poems too.
Reconnecting with an old flame
I admire your ability to turn revolution into a job
in the desert with the good lighting
and a good grasp of calculated endangerment
An easy laugh with a terminal glottal catch
is what I live to affect – personalization sounds good
behavioral conquest sounds good also
as long as I wear the nitrile glove
I admire your calm here at the end
a knowing cover for a freak-out
luxuriating in the killing sun
Self-actualization and -empowerment are great
but you have to tell everyone all the time
the moment you stop you disappear
We could walk by a river but don’t
I was happy just being the most normal thing
in the tombstone of your bio
I am nothing like those who warned you
about me cautioned which is why I said
you should definitely believe them
Turning all the you’s into collective we’s
the secret is to never use I
so you’re never telling on yourself
Somewhere some uneasy laugh
hints at a touched topic
only ever discussed once or twice
and that with trusted friends
who would never dare speak of it
or better yet forget
What youth workshops
old age reveals the magic trick
the coin was never behind the ear
I won’t apologize for this one time
I use it to get back under your skin
and apologize in advance for the next
Apology a sure sign of maturity
along with a smooth demeanor
in the face of tragedy and strife
The river comes out of the ground
and does not disappear so much as transform
into O Wondrous Ocean of Metaphor!… Click to Continue “Tony Brewer Reconnects”
Sleepless, I Wander Out
Sleepless I wander out into the moon’s hallway,
a silver corridor with many doors, all shut, all quiet.
Behind one of them, perhaps, you too are pacing
in a small chamber, trailing the smoke of a dream
behind you. In each of your footsteps starlight
pools on the carpet, its design and patterns
curling like vines around your ankles, their tendrils
kissing your ankles, trying to hold you –
I could tell them that you are a green horse, wilder
than any horse that has ever lived, that no one,
not even I, could catch, or keep.
The Bowl Of The Moon Is Empty
The bowl of the moon is empty
as the hollow of a tree in autumn
after the woodpeckers who nested there
have fledged and flown.… Click to Continue “New Poems by B.J. Buckley”
More paintings, more departures. Utilizing a digital knife for blending, and a steel wool effect in some cases. Imagining all of this on massive canvasses, propped up on giant easels, in one of a dozen rooms in my ancient castle by the sea. Thick walls, high ceilings, stone floors — sun and moon seeping in from on high. And mead. Lots of mead.
Castles fill my mind often, but the most recent trigger was seeing two films: The Last Duel, and The Green Knight. I liked them both, but the latter was, well, strange, which is a good bit of the point for A24 movies. I can imagine Jessie L. Weston, a fine scholar and translator of the Gawain poem, rolling over in her grave.… Click to Continue “Honor in our dreams”
Spinozablue welcomes new poetry by John Grey, Nanette Avery, and D.R. James.
Rereading some good books about Camus and his times, which strike me as highly relevant again. Robert Zaretsky’s Elements of a Life, and Alice Kaplan’s Looking for the Stranger, with more on my To Be Read shelf, including The Plague. His refusal to follow the prevailing winds, his courage under direct and indirect fire, his impassioned moral compass — we could use all of that right now.
Perhaps it was growing up poor, in Algiers, with a mother who was near-deaf and rarely spoke. The silence of these infinite spaces must have spoken volumes to him, along with the sea, the sun, his love of literature and philosophy.… Click to Continue “New poetry, paintings, Coda, and Camus”
THE MOCKINGBIRD
The bird that has no song of its own
gets to choose
which sound will best represent
his fervent mating call.
From high atop a church spire,
he chirps variations
on the theme of a passing fire engine.
The mockingbird is eager
to have chicks.
He is both
the siren and the fire.
WHERE THE SPOTLIGHT SHINES
Yes, the earth looks sweet to taste
with dew pellets perched atop each blade.
Certainly, the rabbits believe so.
And the groundhogs likewise.
Each are out in the fields nibbling the juiciest shoots.
And no better cruising lanes than the sky
or landing field than the upper branches of the trees.
Birds have been doing this since the age of the dinosaurs.
They soar and bounce, pivot and flutter,
see no reason to stop now.… Click to Continue “The Siren and the Fire: New Poems by John Grey”
I READ UBU ROI IN HIGH SCHOOL
I read Ubu Roi in high school
That’s when I first met Dada
Titles someone else selected
Words broken into atoms
The year of Slaughterhouse 5
Not Nam but brutally familiar
Cultivating seeds of
Experimental gardeners
It was the Cabaret of Voltaire.
Copyright© 2022, by Nanette Avery. All Rights Reserved.
Nanette Avery is a Nashville author and International film lover. Her nickname is a palindrome…“Writing to please all tastes is like cooking without seasoning.” https://www.nanetteavery.biz/
Last night, after watching the game, I looked out my front door at Magic, then walked to the back of the house to see more. Moonshadows on the snow. Twins of tree branches on snow-covered ground, spread out like black spider-webs, searching with Sistine fingers, telling stories we’ll never truly understand. Yes, they talk, and talk, above ground, underneath it, across the globe, and they protect and defend. Each other. The natural world communicates a kind of practical, functional, oh so direct vision of love, while we scream (and worse) at our fellow humans over countless nothings.
Snow at midnight. Dark gray on white, with hints of dark blue, floating. Contrasts, impossible. Peace. Light where it can’t be. Light when it can’t exist.
Poets can hear this if they jettison all words — their bricks, their walls — and Listen.… Click to Continue “Moonshadows at Midnight”
Several strands of thought come together, collect themselves, flash. I see beyond and outside them. I know it’s too obvious. The fight. The human desire to undercut. The unconscious desire to blow up — oneself, contrary to conscious goals, even “will.” Nietzsche’s will and more, and not. Not his interpretation of that, necessarily, nor Schopenhauer’s. But mine and, I suspect, millions of others.
What am I talking about? The mass production of subverting and sabotaging oneself, multiplied. It’s no wonder that we’re lost in a sea of stupidity and the counterproductive. We have so many. Too many competing messages to deal with, too many hours a day. And the subconscious has long been a vengeful beast.
Thinking logically, for our own benefit. Wouldn’t that be — wonderful?… Click to Continue “Collective: The Sad, Lonely Life of a Word”
The frightening thing about this important book from 2016 is that its, at times, terribly dire assessment of our environmental trajectory seems positively sunny in comparison with 2022’s outlook. As in, despite its warnings and vivid depictions of Mother Nature as of 2016 and beyond, She has gotten a good deal angrier since then. And this time-shock has been my experience reading various books on Climate Change in the last few years. As dire as they appear when they first come out, events soon overtake them and paint a more worrisome picture soon after. This is accelerating almost daily now.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent The Sixth Extinction, for instance, from 2014, now seems too optimistic in its general hopes for timely realizations, as does Naomi Klein’s On Fire, from 2019, and The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, also from 2019.… Click to Continue “Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement”