Robert Mueller, a frequent contributor for Spinozablue, has added to his list of publications in other venues. He has a poem in the #5 issue of Blackbox Manifold, and will be reviewing works by Robert V. Wilson in the next issue of that magazine. Robert also wrote the introduction for George Spencer’s new journal, Far Out Further Out Out of Sight, and helped him with the launch. George Spencer has contributed several poems to Spinozablue as well. We wish him the best of luck with his new magazine.
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Sofi Oksanen. Photo by Anneli Salo
In Purge, we have a dark world, fully imagined. We have a brutal world, fully revealed. But Ms. Oksanen does not bring us layer upon layer of meticulous detail to make that happen. Instead, she uses the brush of an impressionist, though her subject matter is closer to an unexpurgated 21st century Film Noir. She is also more direct than those who studied light to see how it changed the world from hour to hour. Hers is not an oblique rendering of the subject at hand. Purge goes for the jugular, for the underside of life, and its gaze is often pitiless.
It fits that she counters the ugliness, sadism and betrayals of the war years and their aftermath with the horrors of Eastern European sex trade cerca 1991 – 92. She…
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One of our finest historians passed away on August 6th. Tony Judt, the author of numerous historical works, with a primary focus on French intellectuals, passed away after a long battle with ALS. He was 62.
I recently read his excellent Ill Fares the Land, which would have been a strong and timely work regardless of how it was written. Given the fact that he dictated it while suffering from the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease made it all the more poignant and moving. Here is the opening section, first published in the New York Review of Books:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but
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LOVE POEM THAT LEADS ME
TO A FLORIDA CANAL
The bandoneon transports me
to your lips
relaxed as they are
like orchids
on a late summer trellis.
Orchids climbing the trellis
of your throat.
Orchids like verbs
struggling
with existence.
Orchids
like lovers
from the grave,
as lovers
often appear
from graves.
Beautiful.
Impossible to resist
in their splendor
of Spanish moss
with night herons
perched on giant oak shoulders
circling the moon’s silver waist.
Oak moon.
My moon,
tumbled dry
so many times
that wisdom
separated
itself
from young poets
who occasionally slip
from their conscious minds.
A caballero strikes a match
in a Juarez cantina;
older women
sway;
young…
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Approbations 565
—after Trygve Seim’s Between
Between stare stare
blank
opacity
resembles
much
of the broken
semblances
culture contains, intangible mores
focused
finite and inexplicably distant
from consistent virtues of
italicized
beau monde.
Approbations 566
—after Marc Johnson’s Since you Asked
My silence recalls bland-tongue
architecture,
achromatic
logic containing
prayerful condiments, mutilated connection. Your asking
contains metaphoric trails, my standing still
of an oaks’ neighborhood of size, style—
reanalyzes your truth of committed understanding.
The ideal
would be conversation occurrence
countering the silence
my sound releases
broken
confused meaning of my mind’s innate sepulture.
Approbations 567
—after Bobo Stenson’s Olivia
Wears interwoven light like shadows
climbing contextual walls of needed
isolation. Her
alone
retrieves an image of pale, bleached stone
engrained into sand’s warmed appreciation, resting,…
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Flower Poetry
When the flowers first escaped the row,
having scattered their generatives in time with a good wind,
I used poison to contain them.
All gardeners know you can only own beautiful things
if you keep them in a square.
These were hearty poison-eating flowers, I discovered.
Soon, they made the grounds, even rooting in the concrete walk.
Hurrah for wildness, hurray for its life, I thought,
leaving them be.
I remember too clearly the morning I witnessed
the first flower to get inside the house.
It was growing from the kitchen floor.
I contained this pretty creature by setting a large soup-pot over it.
By next afternoon, the flower had called a compatriot,
and the pot had been overturned.
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