The Deadly Sins/Despair;The One Unforgivable Sin

Yet there remains a persistent counterimpulse, an irresistible tug toward stasis and toward those truths that, in Melville's words, will not be comforted. At the antipode of American exuberance and optimism there is the poet's small, still, private voice, the voice of individual conscience; the voice, for instance, of Dickinson, who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, mined the ideal vocabulary for investigating those shifting, penumbral states of consciousness that do, in the long run, constitute our lives. Whatever our public identities may be, whatever our official titles, our heralded or derided achievements and the statistics that accrue to us like cobwebs, this is the voice we trust. For, if despair's temptations can be resisted, surely we become more human and compassionate, more like one another in our common predicament.

Joyce Carol Oates/NYTimes 25.Jul.93
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There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows +substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - Across - upon it -
As One within A Swoon -
Goes +safely - where an Open Eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone

Emily Dickinson
Dickinson Electronic Archives

...and yellow flesh
And hinge of beak still beckoning...

Michael Waters/VerseDaily

You (actress)
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The most comfortable music on earth.
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Nobody Knows (誰も知らない; Dare mo shiranai)
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IFC

There is at least one gratifying juxtaposition:

But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the world remains fuzzy around the edges. If we were told that our computer worked because there was an angel inside, some of us couldn’t disprove it. The cultures were undivided in Leonardo’s day, but now those of us who deal in metaphors don’t know how to make machines. If we wanted to move a mountain, we would have to rely on faith.

Hilary Mantel/LRB
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The author Hilary Mantel is very well-respected around here.
Stones/Scorcese response any minute now.

This is an anthology, then, of the writing that gets produced when reasonable men and women fight off the extremes of protest and despair to which they’ve been driven by the devastation of this planet. That makes this a practical-minded collection, commendably light on the vaporous spirituality, the blank stare, found in so much nature writing. This is literature for a cause...

Summer in the City:

...Over there, bending the ear of a young cop who was attempting to pry himself away without leaving his post, was the little man who showed up at all public functions, waving a greasy, much folded piece of paper that may once have been an official document. His cause, an ancient and esoteric grievance, was instantly forgotten by anyone who listened to two minutes of it, although it seemed to keep him alive. The dirty shirtless man with the nine misshapen and mange-ridden dogs was there--from the look of them you assumed a carnival of incest--and so was the marooned Swiss woman with the stainless-steel hip who regularly woke up everybody on the block calling all night for her cat, Gaston...

Luc Sante/Pinakothek

Barking

...to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no...

Jim Harrison/PoetryMagazine

watch this space for an idiosyncratic review of Scorcese's Shine a Light
Coming Soon!

Ida Hammershøi
Vilhelm Hammershøi is pretty much my favorite painter

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Poem

...a clumsy
paraphrase of something the woman I love,
who isn't a corporate lawyer, said to me
& messed me up with, which she does often & which
is one of the too many reasons I'm falling apart
with happiness. Her name, or one of them, is
Cecilia—strange, no? I'm terribly sorry...

Nico Alvarado-Greenwood
Verse Daily

a testament to the risks of speaking out or thinking originally in a society ruled by a repressive regime

Geronimo
whom Gen. Miles named the "Human Tiger" detail

Gisele

Elizabeth Shippen Green
loc

She's not real
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This is not related to the Amanda Shaw post below.
Amanda Shaw's about as real as it's possible to get.

Amanda Shaw

poetry here is generally quoted in enticing snippets
rather than whole cloth
Voisine's poem is longer, more complete,
can be read entire at the link
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Unfinished Letter to Death

In the ring, most boxers

Vodka itself is not so terrible if

The tobacco industry has systematically

You see, if I had only been ten minutes earlier,

The toaster and the hairdryer are indeed flawed appliances but

It only took one despot, a painting by Degas, and an angry mistress to

War, to many of us here in the United States, seems a bit

Please, think of the How much would it take to

From now on, I promise to

I can guarantee, not only Geronimo and his ghost...

Connie Voisine
Campbell Corner Poetry Prize
Language Corner
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via Poetry Daily

high speed battle pram

no title given
Patrick Shanahan
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via wood s lot

"We're moving beyond the music space," says Mayers. "We want to use Superfly as the umbrella company to build our brand. Real estate, restaurants, hotels, resorts--we're open to everything."

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Outside Lands