Quick nod and amen for Roland Barthes (b. 12 November 1915), all style, no system: “the fragment breaks up what I would call the smooth finish, the composition, discourse constructed to give a final meaning to what one says, which is the general rule of all past rhetoric . . . the fragment is (1/2)

Saw Ira Sachs’s new movie _Peter Hujar’s Day_, based on the recently-found transcript of a lost tape recording made by Linda Rosenkrantz (author of _Talk_ (NYRB, 2015)). Two things: Hujar’s amusing and gently-dismissive report of photographing an Om-insistent and somewhat pedantic Allen Ginsberg.

Graciela Iturbide / Sin título, Japón, 2014

Graciela Iturbide / Antes de la matanza (Before the slaughter), La Mixteca, Oaxaca, 1992

“Stuck in Flushing.” (Annals of things I never thought I’d have the opportunity to say.)

Graciela Iturbide / Benarés, India, 1999

Two photographs by Graciela Iturbide, out of a tremendous exhibit at the International Center of Photography, in New York City. “El señor de los pájaros, Nayarit, México,” 1985 and “Ritual, Benarés, India,” 1998.

Wow. Series, miniatures, the unfinished. No better genre.

I recall seeing The Alternative Press’s Ken Mikolowski c. 1974 reading in Ann Arbor out of a tiny book printed by the legendary Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press. And joking about how the poems in the book, Thank You Call Again (1973), hardly deserved the impeccable fine letterpress presentation.

Like Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow-Book, "Abū Zayd’s Rain-Book reads like it could have been written yesterday, its author less a scholar than an accidental poet, which is to say a kind of lightning rod." Eric Bies reviews David Larsen's translation of THE BOOK OF RAIN. ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/30/a...

Looking forward to reading this.

Thursday in New York City:

A new month. Somebody needs to put it up here—John Ashbery, out of The Double Dream of Spring (1970):

MP Pratheesh, from “The Burial”

Stray remark c. 1948 by William Carlos Williams: “It is shocking for the uninformed to look at a Picasso or to pick up a poem by Rosalie Moore. He can’t understand them.” Struck by that seemingly provocative equation (Picasso = Moore) since I didn’t recall ever hearing of the latter. So, two poems:

I keep thinking about these lines toward the end of Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, a lengthy and affectionate look at the Statue of Liberty, both elegiac and rather fierce (“a masked woman draped in military gear . . . suited to action in the field”), and wholly without irony or cynicism.

Photograph of someone we are not sure we remember

Out of Susan Howe’s _Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives_ (Christine Burgin / New Directions, 2014), a tiny book with, curiously, a wrongly-placed, or -selected or -transcribed “penciled text fragment” of Emily Dickinson’s (see p. 57 and pertinent endnote):

Upcoming (Thursday, November 6 at 7:30 pm): A DANCE OF LIFE: Violin Music of the AIDS Era Giancarlo Latta, Violin and Curator Robert Fleitz, Piano Greenwich House Music School 46 Barrow Street, New York, NY

Out of a somewhat fugitive magazine called Luigi Ten Co, edited by Whit Griffin and Michael Klausman, two early poems by Ronald Johnson, “sent [by the twenty-four year old] to Louis Zukofsky in early 1959 to which he generously responded with commentary and encouragement.” Uncollected in the works?

Out to West Lake in the 33° F morning: grass frost-spiked, thin fog bunched up in the low spots. A fox sparrow’s meager half-song, like a boy learning how to whistle. Two new beaver-downed trees near the small pond. There, too, a merlin strafing a tiny assembly of green-winged teal, without success.

Newish work in the new Shearsman (145 & 146), thanks to Kelvin Corcoran and Tony Frazer. Here’re a few opening entries out of “July Notes,” out of a manuscript called—after (no kiddin’) Dickens—“Notes for General Circulation.”

New to me. David Larsen's (of _Names of the Lion_ and _The Book of Rain_, both out of Wave Books) translation blog. Arabic literature. Thanks, Kim.

At work, skimming Emerson’s Journals and listening to recordings of Dylan’s radio show. (He calls, approvingly, Sly Stone’s 1971 album “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,“ compared to early Sly, “a much darker record, cynical, the sound of milk going sour, a weary, skeptical record.”)

Out of Kent Johnson’s _I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field_ (Longhouse, 2015).

to steadfastly, delicately “pare any given utterance down to the laryngeal bone.” (Sobin)

“History advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one’s ears . . . A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.” Susan Howe quoting the narrator of Chris Marker’s _San Soleil_ (1983). Out of the essay “Sorting Facts” (1996).

The inimitable and late-lamented Kent Johnson remembered by Jeffrey Side.

Out of “Personal Narrative” (2007), Susan Howe at Yale’s Sterling Library “surrounded by raw material paper afterlife”: “One approach to indeterminism might be to risk crossing into rigmarole as fully stated _ars poetica_.” Rigmarole, out of _ragman roll_ “long list, roster, or catalogue” (c. 1500).

Susan Howe, in “Where Should the Commander Be,” a 1987 essay found in _The Quarry_ (New Directions, 2015), on Charles Olson’s “acute visual sensitivity.” (“This is strange, because Olson built his idea of Projective Verse on the length of a line, and the poet’s breath. _Maximus_ is for viewing.”)

A lovely new poem out of Charles North’s _News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems / Selected Prose_ (Black Square Editions, 2024). Oh for an “impulse as palpable as a hawk”—its push of tenable music.

Draught is now live! www.draughtjournal.com Issue 1.1.1 with contributions by Glenn Adamson, Jen Calleja, Don Mee Choi, Mark Cousins, Daisy Lafarge, Mark Manders, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lisa Robertson, Christina Tudor-Sideri and Francesca Wade

Deadly gray sky, fifty-seven degrees and drizzle, the vituperating socius: I could easily sit here listening to Etta James’s sweet semi-growl through that swelling panoply of strings to the end of it all . . .

Out of Alicia Wright’s You’re Called by the Same Sound (Thirdhand Books, 2025). Formal restlessness, a book of tryings out, here in the form of a plat map. A book soaked in particulars of history and place (Rome, Ga. and environs). “The ledger the fissure the sin of the dog the angel of history.”

Out of Juan José Saer’s unfinished La Grande: the phenomenology of apprehending the “uninterrupted flight” of the world. Memory (and reading, and writing) as “a series of disconnected and ecstatic fragments.” (Died in Paris 11 June 2005, leaving only title and first line of a projected 20 pp. coda.)

Spent an extravagantly long spell today trying to locate the source line (by, I think, Apollinaire) for what I once, rather unseriously, translated as “I ticked off my years & they fled.” Had associated it with a line in “Cortège”—“Rien n’est mort que ce qui n’existe pas encore.” No, & no luck.

The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building is, one expert told me, “the Sistine Chapel of New Deal art.” GSA had a plan earlier this year to save it. Now Trump is rushing to sell it. Save the Cohen, part 2, explains how we got here. Please share widely! newrepublic.com/article/2012...

Re-posting my Tuesday story on the imminent sale and likely destruction of government-owned murals by Ben Shahn and Philip Guston. The Trump administration is a cascade of emergencies; this one requires rapid mobilization by preservationists. Followup tomorrow. newrepublic.com/article/2010...

More flux and (momentary, provisional) adhesions. Here’s a Wallace Stevens (b. 2 October 1879) poem I think about with an alarming frequency, a tiny stay in this “always incipient cosmos”:

Query out of Juan José Saer’s novel _La Grande_ (Open Letter, 2014), translated by Steve Dolph: “What is a novel?” Reply: “The decomposition of continuous movement.” Appended: “…in the sense of representing, through an analytic and static form what in fact is synthetic and dynamic.”

Dipped into Eliot Weinberger’s exquisite (and frequently funny) Angels & Saints (Christine Burgin/New Directions, 2020). The illustration depicts "four converging hexagons. Meditates on the 365¼ days in the year, captures 365 letters in its overlaid shapes.” Densities of significance go abstract.

Short 2007 piece by Susan Howe, out of _The Quarry_ (New Directions, 2015). Jonathan Edwards circuit-riding in clothes covered with scraps of paper oddly recalls stories of Thomas Pynchon, c. 1960-2, writing tech specs for Boeing behind a barrier made of “enormous, stiff sheets of engineer’s paper.”

Just around midnight: heard a great horned owl’s hooting, sporadic, somewhat muffled, unmistakable. One of the few boons of intermittent sleeplessness.

A Bird-while. In a natural chronometer, a Birdwhile may be admitted as one of the metres since the space most of the wild birds will allow you to make your observations on them when they alight near you in the woods, is a pretty equal & familiar measure. —Emerson, out of Journal C, 12 May 1838

Out of Thomas Gardner’s _A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson_ (OUP, 2006), Charles Wright, talking about how the “engines“ of poetry work: “No one wants to say any of this, because we all want to be so meaningful, but in fact, the music drives an awful lot of these engines.” And:

Like a gin-soaked spit- baller, a dumpy little rain is coming down & barely delivering. Fed up with poetry.

Two trees. One out of an interview with Ronald Johnson, suggesting the structure of ARK might be like that of a tree: “I think time makes things a tree.” The other: a line out of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner’s “Eskimo Blue Day”: “You call it rain, but the human name / Doesn’t mean shit to a tree.”

A nod and corona today to William Carlos Williams (b. 17 September 1883). Out of _Collected Poems 1921-1931_ (The Objectivist Press, 1934). With a Preface by Wallace Stevens: “His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit’s cure.”

A page out of Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey’s _A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens_ (Constitutional Information, 2015), a kind of balladic romp starring W. S., Plato (“Before Plato was a man there had to be an idea of Plato”), a horse named Snowbird, and several literary cameos.

Out of William Carlos Williams’s “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1920): “A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.”