Pain Comes from the Darkness and We Call It Wisdom

• Toward an ideal poetry anthology.
• The 2017 Best American Poetry was on new book truck.
• - go look downstairs for that yellow New Yorker
• what the fuck was I just reading - o! - reading Baker's Chowder re: yellow New Yorker
• only anthology I ever read front to back
• when I backpacked by myself took only one book -
• Baal bless the Best American Poetry series and Baal Bless David Lehman for his work.
• I do not buy each year's Best American Poetry, and not because I work in a library.
• Baal bless all anthologizers is the least a shitty aggregator can begrudge.
• I confess I skipped more than a few poems after a fair chance in the yellow New Yorker.
• I admit the yellow New Yorker is one smugass motherfucker.
• This wanting to tell you something, fuck is wrong with me
• - Found the yellow New Yorker, photo top, where my mind's eye saw it -
• Yellow New Yorker the most influential poetry anthology of my life.
• Below is my favorite anthology, and I've rattles and complaints:

• If you ask nice and I'll like you I'll get you a copy.
• Vital reminder: poetry anthologies are perfect bathroom reading.
• All this because well-intentioned people (not just you, fish) yesterday, within an hour, tweeted into my timeline photos of a dead giraffe, a dead elephant, a dead bear, and a dead rhino with horn gruesomely just sawed off, the sick shitsmears who killed them gloating over the bodies, I... 
• Nothing throws me Dark down a spiraling staircase faster.
• I daydream of killing the shitsmears. Not torturing, mentally - I'd not make them wait - or physically - no their pain for my pleasure - just a quick bullet in the temple.
• I'm hiking with Earthgirl instead today.
• I just bought two hours pretending I don't still see them by vamping re: poetry anthologies..
• Too late: post.
• I discovered Jarrell via the yellow New Yorker, though not the below poem there.

90 NORTH

Randall Jarrell
 

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,

I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides

I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,

My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

 

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,

The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,

And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,

Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

 

—Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence

Of the unbroken ice. I stand here,

The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare

At the North Pole . . .

                                        And now what? Why, go back.

 

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.

The world—my world spins on this final point

Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds

End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

 

And it is meaningless. In the child's bed

After the night's voyage, in that warm world

Where people work and suffer for the end

That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

 

I reached my North and it had meaning.

Here at the actual pole of my existence,

Where all that I have done is meaningless,

Where I die or live by accident alone—

 

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;

Here where North, the night, the berg of death

Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,

I see at last that all the knowledge

  

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—

Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,

The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness 

And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

And Willingly Would I Dispense with False Accouterments of Sense, to Sleep Immodestly, a Most Incarnadine and Carnal Ghost, or: Born One-Hundred Nine Years Ago Today

DOLOR

Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

--

Lordy, Roethke. The traditional post, new addition at end isn't an addition but an unforgivable omission corrected.

Six more Roethke poems, plus five SWANS! songs, The Fuck Because, below the fold.

Sixty-One Today

The traditional Jane Siberry birthday paragraph:

Egoslavian Holy Day! Jane Siberry is sixty-one today, her music is inextricably woven into my memories of my first years with Earthgirl, the concerts, especially ones at Goucher College in Towson and in Gaston Hall (Hamster was there) one hundred yards from my cubicle at Georgetown (when she sang an ethereal Calling All Angels even though she'd shifted by then into her one album incarnation as a jazz chanteuse at that stage, before the one album incarnation into a kid's song writer, before she decided she didn't want to be Jane Siberry anymore and reinvented herself as Issa, whose music and art I respect but don't love). When we visit the marina in Deale, the first place we shared, my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry, when I drive by the house in Glen Echo we lived in next my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry.




 

Sixty Today

The traditional Jane Siberry birthday paragraph:

High Egoslavian Holy Day! Jane Siberry is sixty today, her music is inextricably woven into my memories of my first years with Earthgirl, the concerts, especially ones at Goucher College in Towson and in Gaston Hall (Hamster was there) one hundred yards from my cubicle at Georgetown (when she sang an ethereal Calling All Angels even though she'd shifted by then into her one album incarnation as a jazz chanteuse at that stage, before the one album incarnation into a kid's song writer, before she decided she didn't want to be Jane Siberry anymore and reinvented herself as Issa, whose music and art I respect but don't love). When we visit the marina in Deale, the first place we shared, my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry, when I drive by the house in Glen Echo we lived in next my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry.




 
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That Was the Day We First Realized We Didn't Fully Know Our Names, Yours or Mine, or: Fifty-Nine Today

The traditional Jane Siberry birthday paragraph:

High Egoslavian Holy Day! Jane Siberry is fifty-nine today, her music is inextricably woven into my memories of my first years with Earthgirl, the concerts, especially ones at Goucher College in Towson and in Gaston Hall (Hamster was there) one hundred yards from my cubicle at Georgetown (when she sang an ethereal Calling All Angels even though she'd shifted by then into her one album incarnation as a jazz chanteuse at that stage, before the one album incarnation into a kid's song writer, before she decided she didn't want to be Jane Siberry anymore and reinvented herself as Issa, whose music and art I respect but don't love). When we visit the marina in Deale, the first place we shared, my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry, when I drive by the house in Glen Echo we lived in next my brain's radio plays Jane Siberry.




  

• Motherfucking cops.
• Data output on negative capitalism.
• The midterm election voter ID mess. Posted because (a) it's a remarkably naive column and (b) is it my imagination or is there in fact less signage for an election, primary or midterm, than I have ever not seen?
• Ebola and the five stages of collapse.
• The destruction of the Third World.
• Slumming it.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Excerpt from Denis Johnson's new novel (h/t).
• Allen Grossman, for those of you who do.
• Szymborska, for those of you who do, for those of you who should.

     




CROSSROADS IN THE PAST

John Ashbery

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

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"Is It Lasting?" and in Asking the Sphere Becomes a Line

 

Jane Siberry is fifty-seven today. Her music is inextricably woven into my memories of my first years with Earthgirl, the concerts, listening to cassettes in Deale. Yes, there was a Thursday Night Pints, I'll tell you about it tomorrow perhaps, it was nice, lively, one could hear Biden snorting even with the volume of the TVs above the bar on mute. Have a few links, a poem, and two symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams who was born one hundred forty years ago today, the Fifth, written before World War Two, the Sixth, written after. Sorry about the commenting asses, worth suffering through briefly for the music.

• Heart and mind.
• New standard as political contraindicator.
• The anticapitalist transition in Europe.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• The enemy of my enemy is my president.
• The kill or capture presidency.
• I'm told the debate went as expected, everybody seeing what they wanted to see.
• Some autobiography re: the Stern poem below, found yesterday in his new volume of poems that came out of the library's back room on a new book truck - I was born in McKeesport, I'm a quarter Serbian-American, my folks used to take me and Elric and my cousins to Kennywood, one of my strongest memories as a five or six year old is not being as tall as the cut out cartoon of Henry the bald kid, not being able to drive a car on the park's mock Pennsylvania Turnpike.
• Purple Line!
• I was listening, it thrilled me.
• Niedecker reading.
• He is prepared to read more novels about people fucking.
• Yes, Thursday was Monk's birthday. My jazz playlister is on vacation.

TOO LATE

Gerald Stern

Too late now to look for houses
to give readings, to flirt, to eat blueberries,
to dance the polka - or just be in the
Serbian-American club in Duquesne
near that horrible McKeesport, near
that horrible Kennywood Park, and take
a sip, a bite, and half fall off my
stool, and grab her and whirl for fifteen
straight, or just to feel her breasts
against me and to loosen my tie,
my short and flowered tie, or just to
drive home slowly, sometimes even
on the streetcar tracks themselves.
that 68 trolley I loved so much, the
love seats and the rattling glass windows.