I want to discover the magical links Before they appear Though to be honest I’d much Rather actually see them Than invent them whole-cloth or whole-sale Wouldn’t it be great if that were to happen? Hallucinate my way into poetic fusions Instead of just writing them? Instead of twisting myself Into pretzels alchemically With nonsense salt On top Or on the plate? This is what it all comes down to For poets seers prophets and Kitchen repairmen Who turn the…
Blue Shift It’s not just that stars Are yellow photographs Left for Kafka to enfable It’s not just that stars Cover histories and make Puppets for Rilke They really do light our nights Like flash bulbs in Arabia A Mosque open skyward A mirage of water To die for Wicked games above us These stars fall on Rimbaud And replace his guns His Abyssinnia With teenaged boats And lapping Cresting waves Like night cafés In Arles for Vincent…
Camouflage I. The objective of traveling can not Be to lose oneself Unless it be for a moment — The sun shining like cartwheel fire Between Grecian temples The notes wrapping themselves around The winged-legs of Flamenco Dancers at night in Seville The first taste after dawn Of farm-cherished nourishment In Grange, County Waterford Or the view from that tower In Paris With soldiers at the base Looking for dirty bombs And Roma II. The objective can’t be…
Rockers get to be Dionysian. It’s their thing. No one expects them to add the Apollonian, though they must to create music objects, or create as individual artists. They must. But the Dionysian is what their fans want, see, expect — in concerts, at least. Do they expect the same things when they sit at home, alone, listening to records of the same singer, the same band? Right now, as of 2009, it is probably true that musicians can combine…
The tragic case. The artist apart. Mixing dreams with metaphors of wandering in and out of dreams. Mixing ancient, primal scenes, Mediterranean blood, the gods and goddesses of our imagination with the teeming cities and futurism of the early 1900s. Never able to quite express it. Never able to stay fully enough in the moment to be rationally, carefully mad. Rationally, carefully behind the words as the world engulfs you. Because of the world. Because of woman. Dino Campana is…
I first discovered Henri Michaux in the 80s, thanks again to Paul Auster’s anthology of 20th Century French Poetry. One of the truly magical writers of the last century, Michaux was blessed and cursed like Kafka with a sense of endless anxiety and dread and the comedic possibilities of both. He shared with Marianne Moore and the Magical Realists the ability to create surreal gardens with real frogs, but added serious warts on them all. He possessed the idiosyncratic and…