Seeing that it’s National Cabbage Day, here’s Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (1853): “It is too generally believed that the sun has no other function here below than to help the cabbages along.”

Out of Lyn Hejinian’s _Lola the Interpreter_ (Wesleyan, 2025). Is it possible (is it even desirable?) to think with any clarity about thinking? (“Our thinking is hardly tidy, it’s a jumble of letters on a Mobius strip, a phonic blur. . .“)

. . . The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don’t see until It’s all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated, and the trouvailles Of every one of the senses fallen back. — John Ashbery, “Houseboat Days”

Fifteen years ago I undertook to write a poem every day for a year, and did so. Put some up at my blog Isola di Rifiuti, published a few, put it all away. Today, looking for something, I uncovered this oddity, nigh wholly foreign to me. Posted out of sheer mirey flabbergastedness.

“Mais de temps en temps. De temps en temps. Quelle bonté dans ces petits mots, quelle férocité.” (Beckett, Molloy)

A tiny nonce for Valentine’s. Sampling Frank O’Hara’s great phantasmagoria “Second Avenue” (written in 1953, first published in 1960).

For no ascertainable reason: thinking of the seemingly ever-generous and wryly affable Alan Halsey of late. Only rather recently did I learn he’d died in 2022. Here’s a little piece out of _Term as in Aftermath_ (Ahadada, 2009):

… and [she] is now part of the drift called “the infinite.” I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea… — Emily Dickinson (letter, 1882)

Mary Barnard, known for her translations of Sappho

A small and lovely untitled piece out of _Wound Response_ (1974) by renegade balladeer and celestial mechanic J. H. Prynne:

A (too) lazy Sunday morning, fussing with a longish sequence called “The Ten Thousand Things,” and seeing, in an old issue of Montemora (No. 2, 1976), an in memoriam for Charles Reznikoff, likely written by Eliot Weinberger. Fugit irreparabile tempus. (Meaning: “To work!“)

The river meanders, blurs into blue hills, darkens beneath a cloud. . Blood ties severed, now you are my only relation.

Jackson Mac Low. Composition cards for Stanzas for Iris Lezak, 1960

Stray Kenneth Cox, on Hugh MacDiarmid: “He wrote as might an angel fallen among men, appalled by their condition and managing one or two of their languages with an uncommon but inexpert power.” Which reminded me of Ross Macdonald’s encomium for Raymond Chandler (“He wrote like a slumming angel, 1/3

Rereading Kenneth Cox’s _The Art of Language: Selected Essays_, (Flood Editions, 2016), edited with an introduction by Jenny Penberthy, with an afterword by August Kleinzahler. Both Penberthy and Kleinzahler include wonderful snatches of Cox’s letters. Would love to see an edition of such.

“Why Should There Not Exist a World Composed of Invisible, Odd, Fantastic, Embryonic Beings?” by Odilon Redon

Sundial / limestone / Egypt, 19th dynasty, 13th century B.C.

1/ Gertrude Stein (b. 3 February 1874), out of the _Tender Buttons_ (1914) piece, “A Substance in a Cushion”: “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.” Out of Stein’s _How to Write_ (1931): “I return to sentences as a refreshment.”

Of James Joyce (b. 2 February 1882). Javier Marías reports in _Written Lives_ (2006), translated by Margaret Jull Costa, how Joyce once said he “longed to copulate with a soul.” And of the eventual _Finnegans Wake_ (1939), Samuel Beckett writes in _Our Exagmination Round His Factification for

“A garland to fend off the dizzies.” Dreaming of (not so distant) spring with this poem by Sylvia Legris.

Gustaf Sobin, from “Volutes”

Gustaf Sobin talking about exile in an interview with Tedi López Mills in _Uncollected Poems_ (Shearsman Books, 2025). I suspect most writers sense (or readily seek) a kind of exile within—disaffected, fugacious, internalized—and welcome the way unbelonging can work to wry the eye, queer the ear.

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth, and dying in black and white, we fight for what we love, not are - Frank O’Hara, “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”

Randomly traveling (at my desk at work). Two drawings out of _Dessins sans limite_, catalog for an exhibit currently at the Grand Palais in Paris, through 15 March 2026. Henri Michaux, “Peinture à l’encre de Chine,” c. 1950 Antoni Tàpies, “Sans titre,” 1984

Cid Corman

A sweet ponderable out of László Krasznahorkai’s short piece “Universal Theseus”—in _The World Goes On_ (2017): “Predictably—it, the intellect, cannot thrive, because its attention can never reach beyond itself, and, as attention-paying subject, 1/2

Reading of Charles Ives, who “had a habit of labeling people ‘Professor’ he didn’t like.” Who, after “having to do counterpoint exercises and write canon” for the exigent “thoroughbred academic” Horatio Parker at Yale, “came to regard Fugue as ‘an exercise on paper, rather than on the mountains.’”

Virginia Woolf (b. 25 January 1882), out of Orlando: A Biography (1928): “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

Read R. G. Vliet’s novel Solitudes (1977). And noted a recurring complaint against the falsifying wordedness of the world:

Morton Feldman, in this his centenary year.

William Blake

Ralph Eugene Meatyard / Guy Davenport, 1965

Louis Zukofsky (b. 23 January 1904), out of _“A”_ (1978), that lovely mysterium: You are not to throw out your music Grafted to the adequate, Seen as the heart’s beat for more hearing Nothing stronger to displace it The certainty which a third when revery turns to talk must see.

“I do not know how to rid the world of evil, or whether one is simply supposed to endure it. But you are there and are having an effect, and the poems have an effect of their own and help to protect you—that is the answer and a counterbalance in this world.” — Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, 1958

Dorothea Lange / Boots, Hides, Watering Can, Southwestern Utah, 1953

Morning’s tiny snippet. Susan Howe, out of “Thorow” (1990): the political / ecological urgency heard now in that “Only step // as surveyor of the Wood / only Step.”

1/ Sleepy in the late day shine of sun off snow. Considering old notes, mostly Julien Gracq. Out of _Reading Writing_: “What we want is literature that moves, seized at the very moment it still seems to be moving, just as we prefer a sketch by Corot or Delacroix to their finished paintings.

Man: the air that he inhales one day inhales him; the earth takes the remainders. -René Char (tr. Gustaf Sobin)

Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world or to their own minds, as if they were asleep or absent-minded. -Herakleitos (tr. Guy Davenport)

Gustaf Sobin, out of an interview with Tedi López Mills in _Uncollected Poems_ (Shearsman Books, 2025), defining a tradition—beginning with William Carlos Williams and continuing with the Objectivists—within which “my own work can be associated”:

Eliot Weinberger

Yes

Randomly across my desk at work: Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Michelle Vian, and Simone de Beauvoir at the café Le Procope, 1950. I think the first book I ever read in French was Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), set in the U.S. south, published under the name Vernon Sullivan.

“Time is a container.” Finished the second book of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume with considerably more enthusiasm than I did the first (which seemed rather silly and inconsequential, albeit readable enough). Whether I’m getting any of what it’s getting at, is a whole ’nother question.

Out early to Burns-Stokes Preserve, skiff of snow, somber skies, 25° F. Walked for nearly three hours: mergansers and goldeneye on the Huron, tiny flock of yellow-rumped warblers in railroad embankment brush, hermit thrush tchupping in buckthorns. Two wild turkeys roosting a couple hundred feet up.

There must be intervals between the pebbles. / Between each instant, a white needle. -Gustaf Sobin, from "Hold Flowing Polyphonous"

A couple of spitters for the new year. Lorine Niedecker. Who—of “The museum man!”—relates: “My mother who was a kind of Mother Goose, straight out of the people etc. told me this just as it is. You see at this time—1930s—there was this rage to get poetry into direct, simple speech.”

1/ For whatever it’s worth: my list of books read or re-read in 2025. Not included: the books put down out of weariness or disgust, and the books skimmed around in without system. To note: in 2023 (the first year I kept count), I read 130 books; in 2024, 95 books. With 2025’s 88 I’m becoming either

Mystical accidentalism for sound-hemmed naught in night’s botanical glossary -Susan Howe