A hollow place in the rock like a coffin, a sycamore bush at the head, enough to give a shadow for my face, and just at the foot one tall foxglove. Exactly my own length. There I lay and slept; it was quite soft. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, 18 June, 1801

earth’s wandering stones

Lisa Robertson, out of Riverwork, part of a lovely paean to dust (“I am a dust artist . . . displacing cosmic matter temporarily from its solid support to make a negative image of time.”) A way of talking about quotation, circulation, infinite reuse, and how language is ever-borrowed, ever-impure.

3.50 p.m. invisible wind circulates in the trees … shadows, reflections, pulsing light … day of sun and rain

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR_a... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

I come across the plain, the wind within my satchel, the words in quest upon my fingernails, needing a druggist, an alchemist to translate the cryptic branches of my bones. I come seeking myself in calcium fruition. -Gustaf Sobin

Kinship of the poet and the peasant: both, intermediaries in capricious fruit. -Gustaf Sobin

10 a.m. dark clouds … white-breasted waterhen … a coucal … brief sun … rain lilies

Seafarer: lonely word, filled with time and space.

6.46 p.m. gray twilight … stillness … noises carry … the road … birds near & far … voices

The late Cees Nooteboom, out of the Laura Watkinson-translated _533 Days_ (2021), talking about Mallarmé’s search for la poésie pure—“a poetry that would express the absolute . . . a poetry stripped of all that was superfluous”—rather in the way, in painting, of “Malevich or Mondrian”:

Serrat singing Machado, one of those rare instances of poetry and popular music working well together. www.youtube.com/watch?v=etNc...

Jean Follain (tr. Andrew Seguin)

If Peter Brook was alive, I wonder what might he say, asked about the controversy around the multi-racial/ethnic casting of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Walter Benjamin (b. 15 July 1892), who quoted “wholly, meanderingly, thumb-through-ably”: “To quote a text means to interrupt its context.” And: “The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYJO... it makes me wonder what Rexroth, Davenport, Calvino, Fitzgerald, or Lattimore might say about Wilson’s version were they alive

You are entering not a text, but a terrain of lifted veils. -Martijn Benders, on reading Ronald Johnson

How can we measure the light in a name that will fit, or go breath deep into the substance of rivers that run undisturbed by the light’s shape? -Jay Wright

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBcJ... thanks🙏to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

the man & his whole family looked like clean bottles into which life had been poured pure & shining . he sat on the edge of his bed all night day came & he continued to sit there he thought he would never be able to understand what had happened -Robert Lax

Hugh MacDiarmid

Such a small vulnerable fragment by Sappho, saved through the ages (transl. Anne Carson).

We was all as glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all, because he had a bullet in the calf of his leg. -Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

There are songs that sing, there are others that are silent, the deepest of all go backward from the first letter. -Roberto Juarroz (tr. W.S. Merwin)

4 p.m. when a kite cries its beak opens

Every stone stands for the entire Earth, just as words stand for things. The weight of a stone results from the attraction of all other stones (the weight of a word, from all other words). -Andrew Joron

". . . in the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science." (Whitman) -thanks to Gerrit Lansing

Dissolve, coagulate, the chemists say: but the first darkness blinds the human eyes that climb the ladder of the visionary spinal chord to issue in the thousand-petalled sun. -Gerrit Lansing