Posted on: August 23, 2011
Road With Cypress and Star, 1890. By Vincent Van Gogh
Blue Shift
It’s not just that stars
Are yellow phởtographs
Left for Kafka to enfable
It’s not just that stars
Cover histories and make
Puppets for Rilke
They really do light our nights
Like flash bulbs in Arabia
A Mosque open skyward
A mirage of water
To die for
Wicked games above us
These stars fall on Rimbaud
And replace his guns
His Abyssinnia
…
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Posted on: June 3, 2011
The Sleeping Gypsy, by Henri Rousseau. 1897
Camouflage
I.
The objective of traveling can not
Be to lose oneself
Unless it be for a moment –
The sun shining like cartwheel fire
Between Grecian temples
The notes wrapping themselves around
The winged-legs of Flamenco
Dancers at night in Seville
The first taste after dawn
Of farm-cherished nourishment
In Grange, County Waterford
Or the view from that tower
In Paris
With soldiers at the base
Looking for dirty bombs
And Roma
II.
The objective can’t be escape
Isolation
Hermitage
Absolute severance
It can’t be to transform
One’s ghosts into lost shadows
Or shadows into dust
Swirls
Rimbaud could never leave himself
Behind in the Africa of the guns
Gauguin always met Gauguin
Even among his Tahitian brides
The goddess Circe could not make
Odysseus forget himself or his
Penelope
III.…
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Posted on: May 20, 2009
Penny Lane, played by Kate Hudson
Rockers get to be Dionysian. It’s their thing. No one expects them to add the Apollonian, though they must to create music objects, or create as individual artists. They must. But the Dionysian is what their fans want, see, expect — in concerts, at least. Do they expect the same things when they sit at home, alone, listening to records of the same singer, the same band?
Right now, as of 2009, it is probably true that musicians can combine the Dionysian and the Apollonian better than any other kind of artist. Chaos, trance, inebriation, intoxication of one or more forms, group celebration and loss of the self, the dying of the self in that group celebration and swooning fall out. The lone guitar hero, fighting the system, standing outside the system, forever.…
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