Big Window

Love that Postcards Lack by Julia Cohen

In sympathy I write this letter with my right eye closed.

My left eye is weak, unfocused and somehow misaligned.

For a while in second grade I wore a patch on my right eye

but it was too late. I need landscaping advice. The pros are

outside hours and knee-dirt. The cons are a commitment

to Connecticut, guilty time of unspent elsewheres.

Many apologies for last weekend’s mishap, I must train

to write 1) faster and 2) softer. The promise to see you

with my keen right eye, I will make happen. In the

meantime, I will be on this roof, unsteady foot, sunlit.

by Julia Cohen
originally published by H_NGM_N

Greenhouse at Night by Markus Naarttijärvi

A N Y D A Y  is a photoblog by the Swedish photographer Markus Naarttijärvi.   

Visualize This

If you have always wanted to see your ideas quivering before you like a constellation of stars, you might enjoy the visual thesaurus.  Type a word into the box at the top of the page.  The website produces what they call a "ThinkMap" charting that word and all the associated meanings. 

The target audience, as I understand it, includes writers.  Have you ever used this tool before?  I'm wondering what kind of writers would be aided by this.  I've never been keen on the thesaurus myself, but I do like maps. 

Good by Hilary Sideris

                (see Webster's New Collegiate, copyright 1974)

Report card B, commodity, food
long in the fridge unspoiled.

Antonym & origin of evil, grade
of kisser in the kissed

mouth's mind. The news
I'm leaving, you decide

what kind, what for,
assign the qualifier:

pretty, very, no.
You never had it so.

by Hilary Sideris

originally published by Green Mountains Review

Deceptive Media

Andy Bell's Deceptive Media remains one of my very favorite photoblogs.

The Doorman by Jorge Fick

Black Mountain College (which closed down in the 50s) is one of my subjects from way back.  Jorge Fick graduated from BMC in 1955.

If you're in the Asheville, North Carolina, area, check out the exhibit of his work at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center.  It will be up until May 7.

A "Best of" for the 21st C

The annual Best American Poetry series is one of those publications that most poets I know love to hate.  Check out a new "best of" book that chooses work published only on the Internet.  I found favorites of mine, such as  Peter Jay Shippy and I also "discovered" poets new to me, such as Anne Boyer.

 

You Will Want Like Cowboys

I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.

You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.

Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,

words?
You've seen it all before.

That's my last duchess—
all I want I've learned from her.

I want all I've learned from her.
Like Goya and church

you will fever like derangement.
You will lick no less

the ecstatic, and you will grow no more
accustomed to this dirty purse

than I to breathlessness
or pavement.

There is Kansas in the wilderness.
There is not cloudy.

All day the fingering, there your gaze,
there I will saddle up

the pillow, buckle, bobbin, tongue
I wanted from.

-Anne Boyer (Coconut)

Silent Scene by Samuel Gareginyan

 Samuel Gareginyan is an Armenian artist who now lives in Somerville, MA.  I like the way he tells his story on his web site.

Gareginyan is probably best known for his artistic treatment of the Armenian genocide and resulting diaspora.  However his topical interests are wide-ranging.  He's definitely worth a look. 

SnowGlyphs by Geof Huth

Visual poet Geof Huth is always creating amazing things that I never really imagined possible.  Check out his poems in the snow at Unlikely 2.0.

And if you ever end up in Schenectady, New York, on a snowy day, pay close attention to everything you see.

Flak by William West

Apolenaris by Alan Shipway

Alan Shipway is a painter from Edinburgh, Scotland. I found this painting on the Liverpool Museum website.

Perimeter B by Julie Doxsee

It takes 3 weeks to eat the poem. Three weeks of long mornings and coffee spilled under the table where banshees play jacks for big money. Nobody knows. The act.

Twilit foliage dries as vines die in a ravine. A girl  gathers rocks and piles them on her belly.

The past rips in half, one side of itself wounded at the split, umbilical eyes still holding. As the afternoon passes it shrinks to a speck in the clouds.

When eyes meet they don’t touch. The eye never ages distance. Anyone could be gazing directly at you from the stratosphere. Now. Anyone is gone.

by Julie Doxsee

published in Spork

Aurora

Here's a little watercolor by my daughter Pearl (age 33 months).

Htown

Agnes Martin

"My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."

--Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004)

Agnes Martin's artwork is done a serious injustice by photos such as this one.  Many of her canvases are luminous.  I think of them as the offspring of the marriage between a piece of graph paper and a field of snow.

Beesting by Barbara DeCesare

I get the chills and the world
        is a whisper.

Under my chin there's a swarm.
        I drown
        in a gasp.

We're riding high, my beesting and I,
        we are filling up with tiny knives.
        We know a life
        under glass—
        eyes that don't work
        fists that won't close—
        & die together
        alone and prone in the field:

Me, a pinprick on this earth
        you, my yellow rescue.

by Barbara DeCesare
published by DIAGRAM

Calder

A Calder sculpture in late afternoon light at The Menil Collection, Houston, via Bryhll on Flickr.

Units by Sawako Nakayasu

Distance of the heat between now (here) and hockey (yesterday at the park), as measurable in units of body heat or lack thereof. The temperatures vary, as does the distance in relation of each body that has taken any short sliver of space between here (now) and yesterday (around the time that hockey would have happened). These temperatures include cousins of various degree and blood connect, parents of geographical approach, siblings and loves and complete strangers. Some very close bodies arrive only in the form of some very few words, while other very strange bodies arrive in physically intrusive proportions. And where is the hockey in that.

Later, several train rides.
Still later, a dance performance.

The hockey in that is the light malleability of the shifting proximities between very familiar and unfamiliar bodies, new, new, old. Very old, very close. Bodies carry heat together, at times in the form of love, at times in the form of very short-lived love, or new. Distance of time between bodies when moving, when not moving, when moving a small portion of surrounding air. When enough air is moved, that is enough to call it hockey, and when enough of the air has cooled, the game is long since over.

by Sawako Nakayasu

published by MiPo

ART - Kay Rosen

New York is my oyster.

 

New Orleans, 2005.

by Kay Rosen 

via bright stupid confetti

For the Evening Land by David Shapiro

"What causes a death rattle?"
--The New York Times

If there is a sound before death in America

What causes that sound

Asks the newspaper

For most there is no sound

Only a dream of two words: White black

Irreversible or the dream without words

There is no voice in America

Only the finite

Reading the voices

But let me die singing, like the forefathers

Lightning never hits the obtrusive pole,

But the animals shrivel in the field.

And the obscure observer takes a note.

And what is that sound before death--

They have banished the death rattle, the rhonchi, the rales.

We die elsewhere, of something else.

And what is that last sound my mother made

Softly made: archaic breathing. And do not call it a dream.

Nor is it a game: The child says infinity is a small word

We have done away with noise and have left only

The agonal respiration like war material.

You will paint the Americans but is it

The father in a grain of dust, heroic androgyne with honeysuckle

Man in a skirt, woman in a flower, faithless but free

The child thinks the god's birthday must be every day:

He is that old. Fool's gold folly. Crystals slouch out of matrix.

While the spider illuminates his influence with a film

Of joy, the fly develops his refuge in a shattered theme

The dead sunflower almost blocks the sun

Like an old poet, an empty eve coerces us

Like an old fate, the gods are dipped in water and predict

Man is red dust, let there be flesh.

There is no sound before death in America

You do not see the charred soldier, only pleasure.

We have done away with all noise, but the agony of respiration.

And autumn will be the flag of that new nation.

by David Shapiro

Tunnel, Aswirl

A subway tunnel in Toronto via [daily dose of imagery].

Mirabeau Bridge by Guillaume Apollinaire

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

       And lovers

     Must I be reminded

Joy came always after pain



       The night is a clock chiming

       The days go by not I



We're face to face and hand in hand 

       While under the bridges

     Of embrace expire

Eternal tired tidal eyes



       The night is a clock chiming

       The days go by not I



Love elapses like the river

       Love goes by

     Poor life is indolent

And expectation always violent



       The night is a clock chiming

       The days go by not I



The days and equally the weeks elapse 

       The past remains the past

     Love remains lost

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away



       The night is a clock chiming

       The days go by not I



poem by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated by Donald Revell



 

Sunny Side Up

Resources for the Resourceful

Have you found Duotrope's Digest to be useful?   

I just learned about it via Jilly's Poetry Hut.

Red

A colorful photo from Anything But Work, the blog of Hans de Loof.

Big Window

I thought we should start the new year off at Big Window with a Big Window.  This photo comes from Anyday Sweden, a photoblog by Markus Naarttijärvi.  Happy New Year!