these are the terms.

EVERYTHING we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.

Adrienne Rich.

april 27

Martín Ramírez Sin título (Ciervo sentado con rostro abstracto)
ca. 1960 -1963

Eco-taxis

          by Clive Warner

Green eco-taxis gather at night
under grey concrete bridges
metal woodlice mount each other
flash mirrors bump fenders rub wheels
stick exhaust pipes into each other.
Radiators boil over, steam rises
oil drips amber from sump pans
transmission fluid leaks past seals
green water trickles from radiators
cooling systems fail in heat.
Ochre flakes fall from dented bodies
headlights wink in the darkness
turn signals blink red yellow red
springs relax tiredly under seat covers
taximeters explode in blue sparks.

april 3

 photograph by philippe vogelenzang.

October

by Jacob Polley

Although a tide turns in the trees

       the moon doesn't turn the leaves,

though chimneys smoke and blue concedes

       to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park

       in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,

and through each tree the moon shows, halved

       or quartered or complete,

the moon's no fruit and has no seed,

       and turns no tide of leaves on paths

that still persist but do not lead

       where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard

       the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.

Each mind's a different, distant world

       this same moon will not leave.

april 2

 photo by johan bergstrom.

Meanwhile by Richard Siken

 
    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                                                                     the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
                everything's okay,
    a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                                       the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
                      The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many iles, and then suddenly
                                                                                                it's not, it's breakfast
     and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                                                         holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
                Knot the tie and got to work. Unknot the tie and got to sleep.
                                                                          I sleep. I dream. I make up things
      that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                                                        The trees in the wind, the streetlights on,
                        the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
              It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                                                                           green beautiful green.
        It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

the breaks between research are for sleeping, not reading

browsing through the latest issue of Action Yes.

in awe of the two wonderful poems by Amy Catanzano.

currently obssessed by the expression, "My lines keep falling through the false floor."

why we love fyodor

"Loose women would gather in the house right in front of his wife, and orgies took place."
The Brothers Karamazov.

Apart from being a kickass writer in the truest sense of the word "kickass" reading Dostoevsky is always an exercise on regaining the pure, unadulterated joy of late-teenage reading. It brings me back to the time I first started reading Borges, Cortazar, Faulkner. Because, and this is something I don't hear people say nearly enough, reading Dostoevsky is a lot of fun. The kind of books you lose hours of sleep upon, reading into 3 or 4 in the morning for the sheer pleasure of the story, the language, the pathetic and unforgettable characters, the dry sense of humour, the humanity. 2007 saw me falling in love with Crime and Punishment. Last year I read The Idiot voraciously and loved every page of it. I decided to tackle elusive Karamazov (I remember trying to read it when I was 14 in an atrocious Spanish translation, I gave up after 100 pages or so). Sleepless nights to come.

Other cool things read this week:
- Andrew Borgstrom's "Stories with teeth in them" at Lamination Colony. Clever with great turns of phrase.
- JA Tyler interviewing Sean Lovelace for the new Chapbook Review.
- Jimmy Chen's "Check, please?" which I have no idea why I hadn't read before. Sometimes it's hard to be up to day with favourite authors. Also, May was a difficult month.
- Page 94 of Le Clezio's The Book of Flights, specially "let me see the reverse, the interior, life's red hollow, the fissure..."
- Bookslut's interview with Brandon Scott Gorell. I find it hard to talk about poetry, not because I don't read a lot, quite the contrary. What I mean to say, Scott Gorell is amazing.
- George Saunders' "Sea Oak" at the Barcelona Review. For some reason the line "It's Father Brian with a box of doughnuts." has stuck in my head.
- Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbet, which I've been reading on and off in the uncomfortable couches of Foyles South Bank.
- Senses of Cinema's article on the Straubs & Cézanne. Quite rad. I've only started getting into Straub's and Huillet's work seriously this past summer, it's heavy stuff, even for us former film students but it's completely gorgeous and essential art. It makes me excited about cinema again. Also, glad to be reading Senses of Cinema once more. I had lost track.

Also, Blake Butler got a deal with Harper Perennial. That's really great news. I can think of few authors that feel more exciting than Butler nowadays and it's great to see cool people doing well.

Also, ML Press is going to publish an anthology with all their chapbooks. I am so tempted to pre-order like right this very instant. So many amazing stuff in there; Brandi Wells and Jac Jemc and Brian Evenson and Peter Markus and Johannes Goransson and Eugene Lim and... Well, you get the picture. I wish I wasn't broke (and/or saving for a trip to New York next spring). Maybe even so I will give into the temptation. It's damn cheap, too, if you ask me.

Question: Could buying another edition of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room" just because it has a different cover be considered a waste of money? If the answer is yes, I don't want to know. After all, I own 6 different edition of "Lolita", thank you very much.

also edible.

Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary

Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
Full of lake offerings and slabs of light
Which then unwills itself to listen

All you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
All you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
Skulking about and grabbing what you can

Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty

Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings

Yes this is the moon this hurrying
Muscular unsolid unstillness
This endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living.

Alice Oswald.

blurred in carbon, feet and hands, a whole movement

jmw turner

At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.

These are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.

ua fanthorpe