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Westoe Pit
of the ornament black/white
pressing-curve
-ature
cau(gh)terized fingers, tracing
this towel’s design:
fabric genome
dead signs
that small ticklesense shivers the pattern,
a first step into his winter of thens
sprinkled as black specks fluff depths
permission
per-DNA of story until his
face appears
Holbein’s Dead Christ sure—
“but have you tried mining, have you…”
have you when that hand looks no stronger
than the waving of an impromptu parable?”
gesticklelating jezebel
walking that down distance to that tomb
of a home he lived in with Peggy
tea/ teased/ egg on my face
an outburst
of resemblance
trippy smoke from his Woodbine fag
his mission
fifty odd years in a mine
with the same audience and
poor
lighting
lit public house no wine no
whining just pints
better without rising from the dead
even though he did each and every
collecting
these microdots of pore-friendly deposits,
bringing to Quarry Lane an endless supply
of (coal)dustto dust
now that’s the face of resurrection it is
that leaves no trace
except here in the pit
of his stomach
overture
of here
rubbedbrilliant clean
upon this towel.
untitled
Through the door
there’s a tired bounce
to a mired weave
of senior them
iterating
their nasty promises
their reshaped hearts.
“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”
Václav Havel, Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. Former President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, (1936-2011), Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (English translation by Paul Wilson), 1990, Ch. 1 : Growing Up “Outside”, p. 11. (via amiquote)
5 days ago - 
12
12
![asymptotejournal:
In Asymptote January 2012: Wolfgang Kubin on Ouyang Jianghe
I fear the return to “tradition” is an outdated model. All superb poetry is international poetry—it is no longer “national.”
The eminent writer and translator, Wolfgang Kubin, reflects on the cultural issues facing contemporary Chinese poetry, as raised by the writing of Ouyang Jianghe. How can Chinese poetry shed its political baggage, compete with the growing fashion for writing in English, and find a space for itself within the global literary tradition?
EJ
[Wolfgang Kubin’s essay is accompanied by the poetry of Ouyang Jianghe himself, translated superbly from the Chinese by Austin Woerner. The translator also offers us his thoughts on the process of translating Ouyang Jianghe; the image by Legend Hou Chun-Ming featured above has been used to illustrate this essay.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly4i94Aos01qfvw54o1_500.jpg)
In Asymptote January 2012: Wolfgang Kubin on Ouyang Jianghe
I fear the return to “tradition” is an outdated model. All superb poetry is international poetry—it is no longer “national.”
The eminent writer and translator, Wolfgang Kubin, reflects on the cultural issues facing contemporary Chinese poetry, as raised by the writing of Ouyang Jianghe. How can Chinese poetry shed its political baggage, compete with the growing fashion for writing in English, and find a space for itself within the global literary tradition?
EJ
[Wolfgang Kubin’s essay is accompanied by the poetry of Ouyang Jianghe himself, translated superbly from the Chinese by Austin Woerner. The translator also offers us his thoughts on the process of translating Ouyang Jianghe; the image by Legend Hou Chun-Ming featured above has been used to illustrate this essay.]
6 days ago - 3
3Asymptote: We were sure our faces would live on in your silver light, your tyrant...
We were sure our faces would live on
in your silver light, your tyrant frames
Deposit box—
with you, we fought against all we lost:
our youthful balance, valor,
our vigor, saved
for those aged days
soon to come
—Amal al-Jubouri
“Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the…
1 week ago - 5
5 subalternus
this rolling to the prehensile
lip-story of other families,
my half-brother limp diving
with canes of curb-walkers;
no dates calendarific that
bell a mindful arithmetic
far superior to any addings
of heart and heart and heart.
that was that family and that
was that incubating greenhouse
that shelled out for then’s now
and then and any pen la-dee-da.
(oh! look at this self-N.B
genealogy— go back.)
one of them talked of blankets
covering us with indifference
the seventh of thirteenth holy children
none not never catholic
although always universal across
passages whether water or pages.
we were happy with steps in step
that stomped any drying blood
and here or there blind or no
one always knows the path
to other houses’ other hearts.
with thanks to Philip Larkin for the blankets
1 week ago - 1
1 An inner process stands in need of outward criteria. ~ Wittgenstein
Guess the film. (Taken with picplz.)
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Jung (via fuckyeahcarljung)
1 week ago - 29
29
Fish-y
“To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said diminishes the object of its supposed praise.”— Stanley Fish The New York Times. “Will the Humanities Save Us?”
seedy: Jacques Derrida Essay Collection
c-d:
Jacques Derrida Essay Collection 1
Derrida - A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event
Derrida - A Letter to Peter Eisenman
Derrida - Adieu (CI)
Derrida - Adieu (PT)
Derrida - All Ears - Nietzsche’s Otobiography
Derrida - An Idea…
2 weeks ago - 84
84 biblioasis: The Fine Art of Where to Start: Darin Strauss on Douglas Glover. http://t.co/4KYTmu4z via @WSJ
The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which compounded with his sense of powerlessness dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.
John Berger, “Ways of Seeing” (pg 148)
(Source: thestarlethaze, via fuckyeahexistentialism)
