By and About Ted Roethke

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.

He died of a heart attack after diving into a swimming pool.

All of a sudden I am reading

Bukowski again, and for very different reasons than I did when I was 20.

He throws away a lot of lines, but then he says something like

"God is a lonely place without steak."

He's honest, even when he's lying.

Closure Plaque

Q.

What would such a thing
look like or, if you snuck
a lick, taste like? What would it
sound like
if you hit it, gently,
with a child's spoon?

A.

Metallic
powder, or
a hush
after fighting
about the appropriate
lip gloss
for the event,
"and if I change that,
I have to change
the shoes, too,
you just don't
understand
people, what
they'll say . . ."

Interesting Proposition

A predominant theme of Ellory's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."

Interesting Distinction

INTERVIEWER
You’ve called Dashiell Hammett “tremendously great” and Raymond Chandler “egregiously overrated.” Why?


ELLROY
Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was.

Universal Love Story: Belinda

Charming and honest--a rare
enough combination. Combustible.
Burns the face they mix behind
into little floating frays.

This was the best and most
immediate clarity about her:
she was foremost a person
before she was a woman.
Personhood, she told me
once, blotto and hanging her
big smile over the railing,

was what she'd negotiated
from the weird biological
tumult of womanhood.
I never knew what that meant,

except this, belatedly:
the consequences
of me being a man.

Her arm around me
was like being carried
by the rolling force
of a wave. Summon up,
arch, one collapsing step
forward, down. The

dissolve the terms of her gorgeousness.
Which she left behind, with
the utmost affection,
to curl up full height
and shatter her
growing shadow, again.

To shine in use and quietly achieve what others dream

Trip to NJ, oct

Hey, was it the weekend of oct 9-11 or 16-18th that's best for you? If you're still up for it, i'm going to buy the tickets soon.

[these are outtakes from Saul Bellow's Nobel acceptance speech, which is a real barnstormer by the way]

There he said that art was an attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: that it tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer's method of attaining the essential was different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."


I told myself, therefore, that Conrad's rhetoric must be resisted. But I never thought him mistaken. He spoke directly to me. The feeling individual appeared weak - he felt nothing but his own weakness. But if he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself intensifying his loneliness, he discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.



And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible, strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this. Disintegration? Well, yes. Much is disintegrating but we are experiencing also an odd kind of refining process. And this has been going on for a long time. Looking into Proust's Time Regained I find that he was clearly aware of it. His novel, describing French society during the Great War, tests the strength of his art. Without art, he insists, shirking no personal or collective horrors, we do not know ourselves or anyone else. Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides - the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can't receive. Proust calls these hints our "true impressions." The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."



At such a time it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. Conrad was right to appeal to that part of our being which is a gift. We must hunt for that under the wreckage of many systems. The failure of those systems may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from an over-defined and misleading consciousness. With increasing frequency I dismiss as merely respectable opinions I have long held - or thought I held - and try to discern what I have really lived by, and what others live by.

shyku to cincinnati

green wrestling
on either side
of this poem

--

vehicular pinatas
minivans
assfulls of children

--

kudzu
growth of
the glove
over the land

--

catullus cried once
and even he
never knew about it

--

that hole
in his mind
people walk through

--

holding hands
for something
that might be
themselves, or besides it

--

even clint eastwood
stole speed from
the road golden
with problems

--

phil collins
wades the air
we drive through

--

who made these trees
anyway
no one swings from

--

what more can be
known about clouds
that you won't remember

--

how far you've
had to tumble
to be indistinguishable
on my windshield

--

driving with my
ashes in tow
to the city
last century called
porkopolis

--

note to self
when there's coffee
in one hand and
Ice Mountain in another
drive with yr knees

Boggs

"Boggs is a performance artist and monetary draftsman who exchanges original renderings of paper currency for goods and services. He will go into a bar, order a drink, and present a drawing of, say, the back of a five dollar bill in payment. If it is accepted, he asks for a receipt and change, which he then sells to his collectors, who track down the original drawing and try to buy it. The complete transaction--drawing, change, receipt--constitutes Boggs's art. One Boggs transaction was auctioned for $420,000 . . ."

-Robert Boynton writing about Lawrence Weschler, who wrote about Boggs.

It may be stupid

to write a list
as simple as this,
but to get here
takes years:
New Jersey night,
nine windows
open, Yo La Tengo
softly strumming.
If you know me,
you know the rest.

they put us in
to forget about us

the trees don't
repeat
as they grow

but better yet, just try
outpacing
your own sunlight

when scuffed underwear
deflated on the
back of an old
wicker chair

is their only
clump of light

all paths sneak behind
ahead of them

Wearing their stars
inside-out
rendered even the
disasters
kitchens

They were content
To balance themselves
With the wrong
lives, corrected
by the right problems

Poetry Infests Brain of Japan's First Lady

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32659678/ns/world_news-asiapacific/?gt1=43001