From the Introduction to "The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu: The First Full English Translation" [Translated and Introduced by James Green]

~ "Zen" is a Japanese name for a particular teaching tradition within the overall framework of Buddhism which came to Japan through China from India where it originated in the life of Gautama Buddha around 500 BCE.
~ Gautama was not born as "Buddha", that is "the enlightened one", in the sense that this was not an inherited title. Being Buddha was something he earned through spiritual exploration. His diligent spiritual quest brought him to what is traditionally called "enlightenment", a direct experience of the core reality of being wherein the apparent paradox of subject/object duality is resolved, and the underlying life force, which is both something and nothing at once, is perceived.
~ In the aftermath of his enlightenment experience, Gautama felt it was his duty to help others to the same experience and to enunciate his insight into the nature of human existence. Thus, he began to teach those who showed interest. The foundation of his teaching was that having a similar enlightenment would create a release from suffering and spiritual anxiety — a nirvana, a state of being free from this suffering and spiritual anxiety. (p. xv)


— James Green, from the Introduction to "The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu" [9780761989851, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 1998.]

from Leaving the Atocha Station: A Novel by Ben Lerner

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it's like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately. It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting on your reading, Ashbery's poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: "You have it but you don't have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other." (p. 91)

— Leaving the Atocha Station: A Novel by Ben Lerner — Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2011 — 9781566892742

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Untitled, 2005

Aneta Grzeszykowska - Untitled Film Stills>Photo 13

From "Disobedience"

Stop don't always try to say. Leave it resistant
and scary, exact.

— Notley, Alice (1945- )

"for the inconveniently-not-yet-dead"

"Today I can't speak. My body is clearly running through the dictionary of annoying ailments and, having dealt with the labyrinthitis, we seem to have staggered on to laryngitis, or a derivative thereof."

"Being literally unhearable will frustrate me for a while, of course, but as I've spent a week watching grainy film of elderly care-home inmates occupying a space far beyond screaming I know I have nothing to complain about."

"While I was starting to write, I spent a little over 10 years working with various vulnerable groups in various facilities and watched the hard edge of Thatcher's reforms stealing a little more comfort and possibility from lives each day. It's impossible to forget the geriatric wards and homes where human beings sat and wept, pools of urine at their feet, robbed of all dignity simply for being old and not wealthy."

"In the bad places, the worn-down places, the holding cells for the inconveniently-not-yet-dead, no one listened. No one paid any attention when inmates would simply yell in despair, so why on earth would staff want to hear about former careers, children raised, trams driven through the blitz, losses, hopes?"

"It would seem wrong to treat living members of one's own species with brutal indifference, so best to forget that they are members of one's own species – don't let them have a voice."

"But if you have cerebral palsy, it's OK to remove your best means of expression. Just as it's OK to remove the benefits you need to live. The people we don't hear from can suffer without troubling us – we'll never be disturbed by the details of their pain."

"Then again, we can choose not to consider that when elderly residents are moved from one home to another there is always a saving – the move kills a predictable percentage."

"It's interesting to consider that caring for fewer people allows for savings and seems cruel, while making those savings in advance can mean there will be fewer people to care for and yet seems more civilised. I only know about this because it was explained to me once by a senior social worker. His voice was nicely modulated, reasonable, clear."

— A. L. Kennedy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jun/13/raptor-eye-al-kennedy-writing

Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998) by Leela Gandhi

"Nandy's book builds on an interesting, if somewhat contentious, distinction between two chronologically distinct types or genres of colonialism. The first, he argues, was relatively simple-minded in its focus on the physical conquest of territories, whereas the second was more insidious in its commitment to the conquest and occupation of minds, selves, cultures. If the first bandit-mode of colonialism was more violent, it was also, as Nandy insists, transparent in its self-interest, greed and rapacity. By contrast, and somewhat more confusingly, the second was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who argued that imperialism was really the messianic harbinger of civilisation to the uncivilised world." (p. 15)

from Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998) by Leela Gandhi, Columbia University Press, New York.

Nandy, A. 1983, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi.

Opening Sentence of "A Short Short Theory" (Robert Olen Butler) (versified)

"To be brief, it is a short short story
and not a prose poem because it has
at its center a character who yearns."

— Butler, Robert Olen

p. 102, The Rose Metal Press
Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

The Story of My Life -- Helen Keller

"It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present."

— Helen Keller, from The Story of My Life (1903)

Bernard O'Donoghue

Ter Conatus

Sister and brother, nearly sixty years
They'd farmed together, never touching once.
Of late she had been coping with a pain
In her back, realization dawning slowly
That it grew differently from the warm ache
That resulted periodically
From heaving churns on to the milking-stand.

She wondered about the doctor. When,
Finally, she went, it was too late,
Even for chemotherapy. All the same,
She wouldn't have got round to telling him,
Except that one night, watching television,
It got so bad she gasped, and struggled up,
Holding her waist, "D'you want a hand?", he asked,

Taking a step towards her. "I can manage",
She answered, feeling for the stairs.
Three times, like that, he tried to reach her.
But, being so little practised in such gestures,
Three times the hand fell back, and took its place,
Unmoving at his side. After the burial,
He let things take their course. The neighbours watched

In pity the rolled-up bales, standing
Silent in the fields, with the aftergrass
Growing into them, and wondered what he could
Be thinking of: which was that evening when,
Almost breaking with a lifetime of
Taking real things for shadows,
He might have embraced her with a brother's arms.

(1997)

from A Century of Poems: from the pages of the TLS, 1902-2002
Edited by Mick Imlah and Alan Jenkins (2002) (p. 149)

Tony Harrison

Collect

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed,
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief
he knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

(1980)

from A Century of Poems: from the pages of the TLS, 1902-2002
Edited by Mick Imlah and Alan Jenkins (2002) (p. 99)

Opening lines to Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

PART ONE

A HEAD WITHOUT A WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE MORNING WALK

'What are you doing here, my little man?'

'Nothing.'

'Then why are you standing here?'

'Just because.'

'Can you read?'

'Oh, yes.'

'How old are you?'

'Nine and a bit.'

'Which would you prefer, a piece of chocolate or a book?'

'A book.'

'Indeed? Splendid! So that's your reason for standing here?'

'Yes.'

'Why didn't you say so before?'

'Father scolds me.'

'Oh. And who is your father?'

'Franz Metzger.'

'Would you like to travel to a foreign country?'

'Yes. To India. They have tigers there.'

'And where else?'

'To China. They've got a huge wall there.'

'You'd like to scramble over it, wouldn't you?'

'It's much too thick and too high. Nobody can get over it. That's why they built it.'

'What a lot you know! You must have read a great deal already?'

'Yes. I read all the time. Father takes my books away. I'd like to go to a Chinese school. They have forty thousand letters in their alphabet. You couldn't get them all into one book.'

'That's only what you think.'

'I've worked it out.'

'All the same it isn't true. Never mind the books in the window. They're of no value. I've got something much better here. Wait. I'll show you. Do you know what kind of writing that is?'

'Chinese! Chinese!'

'Well, you're a clever little fellow. Had you seen a Chinese book before?'

'No, I guessed it.'

'These two characters stand for Meng Tse, the philosopher Mencius. He was a great man in China. He lived 2250 years ago and his works are still being read. Will you remember that?'

'Yes. I must go to school now.'

'Aha, so you look into the bookshop windows on your way to school? What is your name?'

'Franz Metzger, like my father.'

'And where do you live?'

'Twenty-four Ehrlich Strasse.'

'I live there too. I don't remember you.'

'You always look the other way when anyone passes you on the stairs. I've known you for ages. You're Professor Kien, but you haven't a school. Mother says you aren't a real Professor. But I think you are — you've got a library. Our Marie says, you wouldn't believe your eyes. She's our maid. When I'm grown up I'm going to have a library. With all the books there are, in every language. A Chinese one too, like yours. Now I must run.'

'Who wrote this book? Can you remember?'

'Meng Tse, the philosopher Mencius. Exactly 2250 years ago.'

'Excellent. You shall come and see my library one day. Tell my housekeeper I've given you permission. I can show you pictures from India and China.'

'Oh good! I'll come! Of course I'll come! This afternoon?'

'No, no, little man. I must work this afternoon. In a week at the earliest.'

[Translated from the German under the personal supervision of the author by C. V. Wedgwood]

Don Paterson

"The Alexandrian Library"

iv Small Hour

Your life has a smack of the prequel about it —
a bit underfunded, with you just a trifle
miscast in the role of the younger yourself.
Despite your impressive portfolio of shortcomings
you are not a bad lad, you have come to accept,
on balance, more blessing than blight; though if pressed
you could give the addresses of ten or twelve folk
inclined to feel otherwise, deeply.
Some call you an angel. Some call you a cunt.
They are both on the money: you model yourself
on those various itinerant Johnnies, proclaiming
the Matraiya, the Christ, in the meantime attaining
a kind of provisional, rough-hewn beatitude
before He shows up and comes down on your shagging
and drinking and lapses in personal hygiene.

from Landing Light (p.53)

"The Rat"

A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.

We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.

All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.

from Landing Light (p.34)

"The Light"

When I reached his bed he was already blind.
Thirteen years had gone, and yet my mind
was as dark as on my ordination day.
Now I was shameless. I begged him for the light.
'Is it not taught all is illusory?
And still you did not guess the truth of it?
There is no light, fool. Now have you awoken?'
And he laughed, and then he left us. I was broken.

I went back to my room to pack my things,
my begging-bowl, my robe and cup; the prayer-mat
I would leave. It lay there, frayed and framed
in a square of late sun. And out of pure habit —
no, less, out of nothing, for I was nothing —
I watched myself sit down for one last time.

from Landing Light (p.73)

Versed by Rae Armantrout reviewed

Versed by Rae Armantrout

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


NB: "I don't get it! The Mono-Culture is the hegemony of the vulgar. The cry of "I don't understand it!" almost inevitably qualifies as an authoritative dismissal of any work at hand. Cultural authority has gone into complete reverse: once the most articulate, educated, thoughtful person in the room was the one to listen to; now the biggest vulgarian rules." -- Mark Edmundson, "Notes on the Mono-Culture" (p. 36), (The Massachusetts Review, Vol. L, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2009)

View all my reviews >>

W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

At 18 he sought out the advice of Ezra Pound, who told him to write 75 lines every day. Pound also suggested taking up poetry translation to learn what could be done with language — advice that Mr. Merwin followed.

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/books/01poet.html?_r=1&ref=books

"La fausse monnaie"

«On n'est jamais excusable d'être méchant, mais il y a quelque mérite à savoir qu'on l'est; et le plus irréparable des vices est de faire le mal par bêtise.»

— Charles Baudelaire

"To be mean is never excusable, but there is something in knowing that one is; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity."

— Peggy Kamuf (translator)

Author statement – Charles Tomlinson

"I write a poem out of a sense of encounter and necessity. This is no excuse for the ego to run riot. It means a certain chastening of the 'I' as one looks out at the otherness which often confronts us. By being true to this experience, one hopes to build the ground for a poetry that is sustainable across the years."

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/

From a Rejected Comment

The French gourmet cheese Bleu d'Auvergne has a wonderful aroma, a rich taste; the saltiness increases with the incidence of veining. The overall flavor is piquant but not overly sharp. Bleu d'Auvergne started life as an imitation of Roquefort, using cow's milk in place of sheep's milk. Legend has it that a peasant, around 1845, decided to inject his cheese with a blue mold that he found growing on his left-over bread (the motto being, waste not, want not). And thus, the gourmet cheese Bleu d'Auvergne was born. This French gourmet blue cheese comes from the region of Auvergne and the cheese is made from milk of Salers and Aubrac cows. The rind is very thin and so the cheese is usually wrapped in foil. The cheese is rich and creamy with a pale yellow color and scattered holes and well-defined greenish-blue veining.

Fernando Pessoa

Não tenho ambições nem desejos.
Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha.
É a minha maneira de estar sozinho.

I’ve no ambitions or desires.
My being a poet isn’t an ambition.
It’s my way of being alone.

— Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown [Trs]

O rio da minha aldeia não faz pensar em nada.
Quem está ao pé dele está só ao pé dele.

The river of my village makes no one think of anything.
Anyone standing alongside it is just standing alongside it.

— Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown [Trs]

A beleza é o nome de qualquer coisa que não existe
Que eu dou às coisas em troca do agrado que me dão.

Beauty is the name for something that doesn’t exist,
A name I give things for the pleasure they give me.

— Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown [Trs]

Jules Renard — Journal 1887-1910

On peut être poète avec des cheveux courts.
On peut être poète et payer son loyer.
Quoique poète, on peut coucher avec sa femme.
Un poète, parfois, peut écrire en français.

2 janvier. 1890

You can be a poet and still wear your hair short.
You can be a poet and pay your rent.
Even though you are a poet, you can sleep with your wife.
And a poet may even, at times, write proper French.

— Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget [Trs.]

Nous ne connaissons pas l'Au-delà parce que cette ignorance est la condition sine qua non de notre vie à nous. De même la glace ne peut connaître le feu qu'à la condition de fondre, de s'évanouir.

24 septembre. 1890

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing.

— Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget [Trs.]

Qui sait si chaque événement ne réalise pas un rêve qu'on a fait, qu'a fait un autre, dont on ne se souvient plus, ou qu'on n'a pas connu?

Sans date. 1887

La nostalgie que nous avons des pays que nous ne connaissons pas n'est peut-être que le souvenir de régions parcourues en des voyages antérieures à cette vie.

20 juin. 1887

Ma tête biscornue fait péter tous les clichés.

8 août 1891

My mis-shapen head cracks through all the clichés.

— Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget [Trs.]

Lines from 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes (tr. Richard Howard), FSG, 1981.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. (p. 4)

Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. (p. 6)

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The "anything whatever" then becomes the sophisticated acme of value. (p. 34)

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes but when it is pensive, when it thinks. (p. 38)

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. (p. 57)

Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been," modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. (pp. 93-94)

Lines from 'Assumption' by Samuel Beckett

Then, when his work had been done and an angry lull was imminent, he whispered.

To avoid the expansion of the commonplace is not enough; the highest art reduces significance in order to obtain that inexplicable bombshell perfection. Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty.

In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord. Its struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile.

The process was absurd, extravagantly absurd, like boiling an egg over a bonfire.

He drugged himself that he might sleep heavily, silently; he scarcely left his room, scarcely spoke, thus denying even that rare transmutation to the rising tossing soundlessness that seemed now to rend his whole being with the violence of its effort. He felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions. By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him.

After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence. Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment.

They found her caressing his wild dead hair.

— Samuel Beckett

Excerpt from Afterword to "Our Late Night; and, A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays" (Wallace Shawn)

Obviously society has asked writers, as a group, to take time out from normal labor to do this special listening and transcribing, and each individual writer has been assigned a certain part of the spectrum. No writer knows—or can know—whether the section that's been assigned to him contains the valuable code that will ultimately benefit the human species or whether his section consists merely of the more common noise or chatter. But obviously the system can only work if everyone dutifully struggles to do his best with the material that's been given to him, rather than trying to do what has already been assigned to somebody else.

And of course, like every writer, I hope I'll be one of the ones who will be led to do something truly worthwhile. But in another way, it actually doesn't matter whether it's me or not. That's just a game—who did the best? The actually important question is not whether "I" am one of the better cogs in the machine—the important question is whether the whole mechanism of which I'm a part is or is not one of evolution's cleverer species-survival devices, one that might be very helpful—even at the last minute.

— Wallace Shawn

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

7_____ Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

— Wittgenstein, Ludwig

7_____ What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

— Pears, David Francis & McGuinness, Brian [trs]

7_____ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

— Ogden, C. K. [tr]

A Convolution for the Masses

Quatorzain Contourné: 
ABCA DBCE DFG EFG
or
ABCA DBCE DFG FGE

~ Karel Hrodrik (RdC)

but rather some malign genius...

René Descartes : Meditationes de prima philosophia : Meditations on First Philosophy (from Prima : The First)

12. "Supponam igitur non optimum Deum, fontem veritatis, sed genium aliquem malignum, eundemque summe potentem & callidum, omnem suam industriam in eo posuisse, ut me falleret:"

[12.] "I shall, then, suppose that not the optimal God -- the font of truth --, but rather some malign genius -- and the same one most highly powerful and most highly cunning --, has put all his industriousness therein that he might deceive me:" (tr. George Heffernan, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.)