Swimming

“If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough.”
Shunryu Suzuki



To make something of these times I 
must make something so I will find 
a frame in which to nail my thoughts. 
I cannot beat this lone silence

and I cannot take this seedless 
greening anymore, this yearning 
growth that knows only down and in,
only dragging my thoughts into 

the night where I cannot find them 
though I remember having them, 
remember how they felt if not 
how they looked, remember them close 

and warm, and thought them somehow grand 
or at least telling at the time 
I barely had them, but now? Now 
I barely have them even less. 

Now I am not sure if I have
them or if they have me. Now they 
are lost in their own depths, swimming 
silently in the rolling black 

medium of their making. Now 
they haunt me in their bare being
and unmake me and swim through me
and I will make nothing of them.

Quoets for Poets — real poems travel…

“You can't force it intellectually. You spoil the poem. You mess it up. When you've 
worked through to the real poetic level, the connections webbing together every single 
word are quite beyond intellectual arrangement. A computer couldn't do it. You've got 
not merely sound and sense to deal with but the histories of the words, cross-rhythms, 
the interrelation of all the meanings of the words—a complete microcosm. You never 
get it quite right, but if you get it almost right, it insulates itself in time. That's why 
real poems travel.”
—-Robert Graves

Palimpsests: 2701 Arsenal Street

Palimpsests.

The city as dreamer of its own history.

So many meanings lost in the layers.

Layer upon layer of the past, inarticulated but felt.

Dreams and ghosts of the past, bleeding one into the other.

Shades that clutch at the heart of the urban roamer, le flâneur, stopping him in his tracks.

“At streetcorners, before housefronts and shopfronts, in proximity to particular doorways, particular stretches of cobblestone, particular entrances to the catacombs, particular cafés and cabarets, he experiences an uncanny thickening and layering of phenomena, an effect of superimposition, in which remembered events or habitations show through the present time and place, which have suddenly become transparent, just as in film an image may bleed through one or more simultaneously perceptible, interarticulated images in multiple exposure. It is a dreamlike effect, with the moving imagery characteristically yielding, in the flâneur’s case, a “felt knowledge” that is not yet conceptual.”

–Howard Eiland, “Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project”

(This is a project that I have been ruminating over for a couple of years.  I owe many thanks to Timothy Moss, fellow flâneur from the other side of the world, for the impetus to finally get this under way.  I strongly encourage you to stroll amongst his truly phenomenal images here.  His is the eye of “an intensely heightened kind of receptivity” and makes my eye look like mud.)

Quoets for Poets: audience?

“Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless a poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an “audience”: They’re talking to a single person all the time.”
–Robert Graves, from the Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 11

Quoets for Poets — …the perfect poem…

(Another one from Mr. Graves...because Lynn and I were talking about the "P" word...
and with a photo [for phoets?] because lucking into the fatherhood of this little girl is 
the closest I figure I'll ever get to achieving it and yes.....it is more than enough. )





“Though, of course, a perfect poem is impossible. 
Once it had been written, the world would end.
”
—-Robert Graves

Quoets for Poets — first and last

 

“Never write the first line if you already know the last.  
The best poem is the unwritten poem.”
--William Logan