Posted on: December 27, 2009
Monastery burial-ground under snow, by Casper David Friedrich. 1818.
(Destroyed WWII)
Millions of people drive during the holidays. To and from. Rarely just to. I drove through ice and torrents of rain south, then through a cloudy day north and into white mist and fog. The drive, something about the drive, and the time, and the strangeness of endlessly moving forward in relative terms, led to the poem below, and a work in progress:
The Trip
The vanishing point teases us
Tempts us with the power
Of horizons
So I tried
I really tried to outrun it
What exists beyond the V?
What exists?
How does it stay just beyond our reach
As we hurtle forward like a car?
Can we go beyond the center of the sky?
Can we trick what vanishes
Into the…
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Posted on: December 19, 2009
Hamlet and Horatio, by Eugèné Delacroix. 1839
Below, we have some new poetry from Robert Mueller, one of our frequent contributors. Robert has a great sense of the potential for soundful poetry, for the music of language, its aural qualities. His poems should be read aloud, listened to carefully, chewed on a bit.
.…
Reading a bit of Harold Bloom on Genius makes me ponder the difference between talent and genius. As was his intention. An early quote:
Though Shakespeare is the largest consciousness studied in this book, all the rest of these exemplary creative minds have contributed to the consciousness of their readers and auditors. The question we must put to any writer must be: does she or he augment our consciousness, and how is it done? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified,
…
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Posted on: December 19, 2009
Community Still
What can the Lords of Everything
about dull eccentricity complain?
A fine shill, which is to see kirtle
cock-eyed and expect its rounding up,
would cheer, would meet the sun.
And then at sacred hoops the banners
stream, and yet no historian
writes with finish the broken
horizon, and these Prodigals replay
their Herculean task unnoticed,
while grownups pass and joggle,
sniff and blow and jo, and shuffle, prattling feet.
Witness, at cost, the skipping girl:
She finds in a book honors
of wet cheeks and high ploys to relief
in bouncing from flue to pratfall; silvers
schooldays yet in stern lessons, polymath craze.
Or coal-boy, rougher than the dirty feathers
of his temperatures, dreams a leaf
and glimmers churlish in the post-tomtom clear.
That even…
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Posted on: December 8, 2009
A Christmas Tale. Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. 2008
“A Christmas Tale” is a strange piece of movie-making, but quite effective for all of that. It turns many conventions on their heads, and does so both with a naturalistic flare and innovative camera work. It is the story of an unruly, dysfunctional family, their squabbles and their secrets, with few, if any, resolutions. It’s not your typical holiday movie. It’s not even a typical holiday movie sending up other holiday movies. It seems without genre, though the director, Arnaud Desplechin, samples from other movies like “Funny Face”, “The Ten Commandments”, and Max Reinhardt’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. He sometimes points his actors at the audience to give soliloquies as well, borrowing yet again from Shakespeare.
Cancer is both a reality and a metaphor in “A Christmas Tale”, but is used lightly, strangely enough. Lightly, like a coat that…
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