Swim Poem
for Barry
The Nude Swim
by Anne SextonOn the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness.All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun by the boat
where the Italian boatman slept
with his hat over his face.
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
Poetry and belief, as I understand them, are antithetical modes of knowledge, but they share the peculiarity of taking place between truth and meaning, while being somewhat alienated both from truth and from meaning. Meaning gets started only by or from an excess, an overflow or emenation, that we call originality. Without that excess even poetry, let alone belief, is merely a mode of repetition, no matter in how much finer a tone. So is prophecy, whatever we take prophecy to be.
– Ruin the Sacred Truths (p. 12)
*********SPECIAL BONUS**********
What do you mean you didn’t know that Bloom’s title is drawn from an Andrew Marvell poem about Paradise Lost?
Read Marvell’s “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost'”
Then why not revisit the only Andrew Marvell poem you actually know?
Now let us sport us while we may
Excerpt: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
I just finished reading this tragedy by an Irish writer (with a Catholic background, of course, for those who know my obsessions). It was recommended to me, but I can’t remember by whom. It was brilliant and relentlessly bleak. Here is a section where the protaganist begins to lose her faith:
Was there nothing to pray to? Was the confession she had just made a form, something you went through to ease your conscience? If it was, then how easy it was to explain all the miseries, the follies, all the useless novenas, the prayers that never got an answer. And if it was true, then all the priests, all the bishops, all the cardinals, are wrong. Deluded men, believing they are being helped by a God who is not there. An unhelpful God. Why does he make men suffer?…
Power Quote: Allen Tate (with SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE)
I take the somewhat naive view that the literature of the past began somewhere a few minutes ago and that the literature of the present begins, say, with Homer. While there is no doubt that we need as much knowledge of all kinds, from all sources, as we can get if we are to see the slightest lyric in all its richness of meaning, we have nevertheless an obligation, that we perilously evade, to form a judgment of the literature of our own time. It is more than an obligation; we must do it if we would keep on living. When the scholar assumes that he is judging a work of the past from a high and disinterested position, he is actually judging it from no position at all but is only abstracting from the work those qualities that his semiscientific method will permit him to see; and this is the Great Refusal.
– “Miss Emily and the Bibliographer”
(from Praising it New: The Best of The New Criticism; Garrick Davis, ed.)
**********SPECIAL ALLEN TATE BONUS FEATURE*********
Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”
and Lowell’s rejoinder, “For the Union Dead”
bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye
O Captain, My Captain: Lish Power Quote #4 & 5
Scare myself, change the terms, rearrange the rules, let recklessness overtake me, see if I can outrun habit, make a friend of chaos.
My Romance, pg 25
Extra bonus righteousness for your Captain-buck quote:
Yes, yes, yes, yes, writers, fucking writers, fucking rewriters, fucking usurpers, fucking assassins. Skip it, names. I am sick of it, names. Me, I will see you in the lobby.
My Romance, pg 141
An Excerpt from Conversations with Angels: What Swedenborg Heard In Heaven
The Devil
There still exist people who follow the work of Emanuel Swedenborg in this world. He was a Christian mystic (who influenced the likes of William Blake, a favorite of mine, as well as Borges and Jung and Helen Keller) whose work sometimes intimidates me, because he saw so much that I sometimes feel he really hallucinated all the time after a certain point in his life. And that scares me and breaks my heart. Then again, he was a man who had found salvation and inspired a new Christian religion. Maybe he was truly blessed. I guess we’ll never know for sure. That said, he knew for sure. His books are published by the Swedenborg Foundation. Here’s a funny bit about running into some devils:
“New Year’s Day” by Robert Lowell (with special free associative bonus)
Okay, it’s almost 3PM now, so I guess I better start pulling it together. The passed-out girl is officially getting up off the picnic table, and trying to figure out where she threw her top. A week or so ago I was buying a book for a friend on Amazon, and figured what I always figure when I buy from Amazon, which is that I should put the money I was going to spend on shipping charges into another purchase, because once you nudge up to $25 the shipping becomes free. So which book?
Ounce of Pound
Another point miscomprehended by people who are clumsy at language is that one does not need to learn a whole language in order to understand some one or some dozen poems. It is often enough to understand thoroughly the poem, and every one of the few dozen or few hundred words that compose it.
– “How to Read”
Catch it if you Can: The Sad Meal, by DJ Dolack
I met DJ Dolack for the first time a few weeks before Christmas, at a party. Turns out we’ve both written for Coldfront. So okay, nice to meet you, DJ. Then the next week I’m getting ready to give this reading for Hexed, and notice that I’ll be sharing a bill with–among others–one DJ Dolack. Also, now that I think about it, weren’t me and dude both in the Fall 2008 issue of diode? (Yes.) Weird how much your life can overlap with somebody else’s without either of your even knowing it. Well, anyway, when we were at the reading, DJ gave me a copy of his 2005 chapbook, “The Sad Meal,” which was published by Eye for an Iris and distributed through Black Ocean. It’s a gorgeous little book, on nice paper, about the size of a thank you card (it came in an illustrated envelope) and bound with a single staple. I have no idea how many were printed, or how to get one (Eye for an Iris’s site seems to not have anything on it, and the Black Ocean page for “The Sad Meal” doesn’t exist anymore) but I have one and I think it’s pretty cool.
O Captain, My Captain: Lish Power Quote #3
Work on your blanks.
– Arcade, p. 172