Get a Job. Rita Ackermann

Maia Evarista Charlotte Ibar

Kime Buzzelli ARTWORK

Joan Didion

TIM LOKIEC

I have a chapbook out. Please see!

Its called Year Zero and its through Scantily Clad Press:

http://tinyurl.com/bcxvfn

Rita Ackermann

Paul Celan

Death Fugue
by Paul Celan
Translated by Jerome Rothenberg

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us to play for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
the scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite

Mary Timony

A SONG IN THE WILDERNESS BY PAUL CELAN

A garland was wound out of blackening leaves in the region of Akra:
I reined my dark stallion around and stabbed out at death with my dagger.
From deep wooden vessels I drank of the ashes form wells there at Akra,
and charged straight ahead at the ruins of heaven with firmly set visor.

The angels are dead and the Lord has gone blind in the region of Akra,
and no one will guard for me those who have gone to their sleep and are resting.
The moon has been hacked into bits, the flow'r of the region of Akra:
Like dark russet thorntrees they blossom, those hands wearing rings that are rustling.

So now at the last I must bend for a kiss when they're praying in Akra...
O scant was the breastplate of night, the blood through its buckles is oozing!
Now I am brother and smiling, the ironclad cherub of Akra.
And still do I utter the name and still on my cheek feel the blazing.

More Rita Ackermann

CANDY

Gorgeous bits and globs of yum yum cerebral sweets to chew on:

FROM PROSTITUTION NOTES
SUZANNE LACY, 1975

“I’m getting a strong feeling about maps.”

“(she’s entrapped by a cop who has solicited her
and fucked her
and who then arrests her.”

“After a woman has been in court enough times
what she learns is the behavior of the guilty
so she’s always found guilty.”

FROM VIOLENCE
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

"In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions,
the developed countries 'help' the undeveloped with aid,
credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue,
namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the
miserable situation of the undeveloped."

FROM MEDIA UNLIMITED
TODD GITLIN

"... a collage of back-to-back stories, talk show banter,
fragments of ads, soundtracks of musical snippets. Even as we click
around, something FEELS uniform--a relentless pace, a pattern of
interruption, a pressure toward unseriousness, a readiness for sen-
sation, an anticipation of the next new thing. Whatever the diversity
of texts, the media largely share a texture, even if it is maddeningly
difficult to describe--"

"The buzz of the inconsequential is the media's essence."

"We vote for a way of life with our time."

"So emerges the modern individual, a role player who is also a
part-time adventurer and stimulus seeker, trying frenetically to find
himself by abandoning himself. This paradoxical individual is primed
for unlimited media."

Two new poems in Guernica

I am happy and proud to say: I have two new poems in the gorgeous Guernica!

http://www.guernicamag.com/poetry/873/two_poems_14/

Emily Cruz

WILLIAM EGGLESTON

Guillermo Munro

I just discovered the artist, Guillermo Munro and his work. Astounding, I think. Take a look. What i love about his work is the sheer beauty used to depict trouble--what I am always going for in my writing.

And here is his website for more:
http://www.gmunro.com/

Optimistic Man by Nazim Hikmet

as a child he never plucked the wings off flies
he didn't tie tin cans to cats' tails
or lock beetles in matchboxes
or stomp anthills
he grew up
and all those things were done to him
I was at his bedside when he died
he said read me a poem
about the sun and the sea
about nuclear reactors and satellites
about the greatness of humanity

RITA ACKERMANN

I LOVE THIS DRAWING.

Vintage postcards of Mexicans

Was just now trolling the google land for images of Mexican cowboys/vaquero when I took a wrong turn and found these vintage postcards. Nothing has changed. Americans just adore Mexicans when Mexicans do drag. The silent peasant, the enlightened Indian, the sexy Senorita, the happy Caballeros, ...

Dana Carlson

"As it is, the arts are the hospitals for our souls, so they need to be of the best integrity. I have a theory that George devoted himself to ballet because it served as his visa out of Russia during those horrific times. Ballet gave him his existence and his salvation outside Russia and nurtured his genius, and that’s why he never got bored and why he became so prolific. You can’t be flippant about genius. The mind sets you on a path to be the best. You must work at making your life work for you; you are responsible to posterity."

--Ballerina, Suzanne Farrell, in conversation with Emily Fragos.
From BOMB, 2003, Issue 85.

Controlled Chaos

SOME THOUGHTS ON POETRY & THE INEXPRESSABLE

“A strong poetry would be a poetry that discerns and finds a poetically adequate means of bringing to mind the catastrophe of history.” {think Walter Benjamin’s storm of history—cc’s notes}—Allen Grossman, poet.

“Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate to idle chatter.”
--Theodor Adorno, philosopher

{&, Adorno, again later :} “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”

On Adorno: “People such as Adorno worried that attempting to condense the incomprehensible suffering of the Holocaust into a few lines of poetry world ‘violate the inner coherence of the event’ casting it into a mold too pleasing or too formal.”—Langer, Art form the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology.

Memoir=placing down actual stones of experience while Poetry condenses experience: truncating and simplifying. ?

Solution to make (like Benjamin’s Arcades Project or Sebald’s memoir/ novels/non-fiction works) a map of the inexpressible chaos?

Alas, T.S. Eliot stated: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

And, again, Walter Benjamin {from Unpacking my Library}: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

--Thomas Mann

Elizabeth Huey

The Outsiders

boys as brother. rich v poor. owls and rabbits. a church goes up in flames. death at 14. gorgeous boy orphans and beautiful blonde hair.

poor white boys reading Gone with the Wind in the 50s--paradise they can't grasp in their city suburb/cracked house.

we heart s e hinton.

"Diet books out sell any other books on the market...except the Bible."

"For many girls and women...a media-saturated, consumer-oriented culture provides the primary images, beliefs and practices through whcih the truths of their lives are sought and defined."

--From Starving for salvation, Michelle Mary Lelwica

"...I had always believed that genuinue art was a risky business and artists experiment with new forms not in order to cause a sensation but because the old forms are no longer adequate for what they want to express. In other words, making it new in the way Sylvia did had almost nothing to do with technical experiment and almost everything to do with exploring her inner world--with going down into demons.

--A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath

Elizabeth Huey painting

kime buzzelli

steve in new york

Christopher Reiger

Cabinet of Curiosities

"The zoo cannot but dissapoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechaniaclly. They have been immuned to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention."

Extract from "Why Look at Animals" by John Berger