I'd Been Feeling Bad About the Way My Fear of Anger Had So Poorly Equipped Me for Any Kind of Revolution

• The Official Egoslavian New Year's Song. Here, New Year's links before they go stale.
• Someone else thought of George last night.
• Four more George songs.
• Thoughts on the year that was and the year to come.
• The cold wet mackerel of reality.
• The New Yeers Gift.
• New Years Eve: The Book of the Dead.
• RPM of the above post mentioned Jack Gilbert in a tweet yesterday, here, Jack Gilbert poems.

UPDATE:

POEM AT THE NEW YEAR

John Ashbery

 

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,
that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other
principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is.

 

Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the drop was
on the burr I know not. I come all
packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things,

 

I wonder about Australia. Is it anything like Canada?
Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete
the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system?
Can we trust others to indict us
who see us only in the evening rush hour
and never stop to think? O I was so bright about you,
my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.
At least that’s how it feels to me.

 

I know it as well as all the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you stood in line for things, and the soiled light was
impenitent.  Spiky was one adjective that came to mind,

 

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.
Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke
in cafés and outside the great ashen bird
streamed from lettered display-windows, and waited
a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.

• 2014 sucked.
• New Year's dissolution.
• The imperial collapse playbook.
• You’re not going to brow-beat critical race theory into the heads of people like Daniel Palenteo who relish actually beating on black people.
• What was ello?
• If Maryland kills the Purple Line. When, not if, probably.
• Richard's year in reading.
• Below, three 2014 highlights! I will buy you a copy of Nealon's Heteronomy if you ask me.

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