Breeding Lilacs ~ Wednesday, September 15, 2021

"Breeding Lilacs"

Imitate, Steal, Deface, Make Utterly Different

Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

Reflecting light upon the table as

Exploring hands encounter no defense;

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

Dry bones can harm no one. / Only a cock

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

nothing, / Looking into the heart of light,

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

London Bridge is falling down falling down

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing

crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

~ T. S. Eliot (from "The Waste Land")

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”

~ T. S. Eliot (from "The Sacred Wood")

At Night All Blood Is Black ~ Sunday, August 29, 2021

At Night All Blood Is Black

by David Diop

Translated by Anna Moschovakis

from Frère d'âme

by Éditions du Seuil in Paris, 2018

Pushkin Press, 2020

London, England

All rights reserved.

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~ To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it's to cheat, it's to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God's truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single. ~ p. 138

~ It makes a small moist sound like that of a child pulling his thumb out of his mouth quickly because his mother has forbidden him to suck on it. ~ p. 130

Wilhelm Dilthey ~ Thursday, April 22, 2021

Fragments for a Poetics (1907 - 1908)

Translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel

The Lived Experience of the Poet

He has a great capacity for suffering. He becomes engrossed in this suffering and fashions it into a lasting mood. Precisely because of this he is able to liberate others by allowing suffering to be resolved in tranquility. (p. 227) ~ Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey

Selected Works

Volume V

Poetry and Experience

Rudolf A. Makkreel

and Frithjof Rodi, Editors

Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright ©️ 1985

All Rights Reserved

Leon Spinks, Jr. ~ Monday, February 8, 2021

Spinks had a largely unstable life after retiring from the ring. He said he had lost the money he earned, and he traveled around the country, seeking what jobs he could find. At age 52, he made a stop in Columbus, Neb., where he worked as a Y.M.C.A. custodian and unloaded McDonald’s trucks.

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“My dad had gone around and told people I would never be anything,” Sports Illustrated quoted him as saying. “It hurt me. I’ve never forgotten it. I made up my mind that I was going to be somebody in this world. That whatever price I had to pay, I was going to succeed at something.”

~ Leon Spinks, Jr.

NYTimes: Leon Spinks, Boxer Who Took Ali’s Crown and Lost It, Dies at 67

Leon Spinks, Boxer Who Took Ali’s Crown and Lost It, Dies at 67 https://nyti.ms/3cN0Ehm