John Latta

Et puis?

Helene Schjerfbeck, “Girl at the Gate I,” watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper, 1897-1902

Helene Schjerfbeck, “The Door,” oil on canvas, 1884

Another couple of works by the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946). “Girl at the Gate I,” watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper, 1897-1902, and “The Door,” oil on canvas, 1884. Superb portraitist and colorist. Seemingly inherent, a tendency toward the abstract.

Modernity & its aftermath: to Uber up the Henry Hudson & across the Geo. Washington Bridge with Dabigouna, to see Giancarlo’s gig work pickup string quartet play “Radio Ga Ga” and other Queen covers on a stage covered with hundreds of mock candles, & to go out for terrific Korean food in Fort Lee.

(notes)

A fallen mango,
half-eaten by a flying fox,
covered with small
black honey bees.

.

The time it takes the sun
to cross the sky
and set beyond the river.

.

On the trunk of a wild jack
grows yellow fungus
in the shape
of a human ear.

Helene Schjerfbeck, “Still-life in Green,” c. 1930

Helene Schjerfbeck, “Still-life in Green,” c. 1930. In the exhibition, “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” at The Met in New York.

Milton Avery
Still life with Lemons (1945)

(notes)

High overhead
a pariah kite wheels

floating among
vast cumulus clouds.

.

blue-eared kingfisher
savanna nightjar

crested goshawk
indian nuthatch

eurasian sparrow hawk

.

‘Battered moon, faint in the blue morning sky’

Thanks, Kim. I'll have a look.

In the Paul Carroll-edited anthology _The Young American Poets_ (1968), a note by Robert Hass (b. 1941). Pertinent, perhaps, to the present. I like “alienation . . . a way of being human in a monstrously inhuman world” and the (debatable) “feeling human was a useful form of political subversion.”

Good call. Jack Kerouac, too, with an invented horse race / track system using marbles. I think it's described in Visions of Gerard.

Image features the prominent American abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko standing in front of one of his paintings, wearing a button down collar shirt, dark pants, a blazer looking down and holding a cigarette in his studio, 1964.

Untitled, Black on Gray, 1969 by Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970

❝I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy,
ecstasy, doom...❞

“I do not know why I write or, rather, I know only too well.
If I keep writing in my night when I am nothing but invisible writing, if I cannot help writing, it is perhaps in order to resurrect in the eyes of another.”

— Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

How odd to receive, by text, a photograph of one’s own work—written in the intrepid days of one’s youth. How unsettlingly denatured, ostranenie’d that work seems, like something a cheer-wrecked hobo at a hitchhiker’s crossroads in Michigan might’ve dropped into one’s hat. Alors:

Giorgio Morandi, “Flowers,” oil on canvas, 1924.

Giorgio Morandi, “Still Life,” oil on canvas, 1961.

Thumbing through a couple of new books at work. Two paintings by Giorgio Morandi. “Flowers,” oil on canvas, 1924, and “Still Life,” oil on canvas, 1961. The lovely intransigence of the earth, its blunt colors.

Samuel Beckett—whom I like to think of as God’s most ferocious joker—in an interview with John Gruen, in Vogue, in 1969: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” (Rather serendipitously found, and new to me: maybe it’s a line everybody knows. . .)

I reread that line endlessly, and slowly—partly for sense, partly because that row of soft _ng_ sounds make me feel like I’m gagging. “Self-stung” is surely a stopper along the way. And truth is, I still don’t know what’s being “said” exactly.

“…beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.”

(Beckett, Molloy)

Semi-washout of a Sunday. Shoveled a couple inches of late snow. Pestered, irrefragably, and to little avail, some lines of the long poem. Read another swatch of Krasznahorkai’s _Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming_ (2019). Fossicked again through Wright’s _Buffalo Yoga_ (2004). Two short pieces thereof:

Love the title.

Charles Wright, out of _Buffalo Yoga_ (2004). Odd specter of the poem as made of several sizes and varieties of silence, angelic, shining, fraught.

Hug

Intrigued, say more? Avoiding / tired out by the poetry wars of earlier generations?

And, out of _The Mirror and the Sea_ (1944), Auden’s Shakespearean ragù, reworking The Tempest material, a heave of lines out of “Prospero to Ariel”):

Too, there’s Auden’s Poundian (“All ages are contemporaneous”) remarks regarding “the word tradition” in “The Poet & The City” (1962):

Thinking of W. H. Auden (b. 21 February 1907) and his seemingly effortless demotic rhymes:

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

Opening lines of “A Walk After Dark” (1948).

Terrific news! It’s work I keep returning to, with increasing pleasure, and huge admiration.

Please let me know when your own various “in the works” things drop, too, Kevin.

Annulet returns with Issue (9) and (10), a double decker that features the first iteration of our open folio "American Poetry & Poetics, 2008–2025." So much is here for you to read. We're so happy to be back.

I was joking about the fee, of course. I did like Atocha, but what seemed fresh 15 years back might not seem so now. But I read everything Lerner writes, and generally look forward to it.

Cute. (And I love the Song Cave's work. Have since their early kitchen table chapbooks.) But I wonder at what point "we" ought to stop encouraging that sort of thing. (I wonder, too, if there were any "product placement fees" tendered. . . .)

Who pairs it with Kerouackian practice, and Kerouac’s "Nothing is muddy that _runs in time_ and to laws of time." The moment is movement, attention a breeding of finer attentions.