WELCOME TO THIS WEBLOG

01:00 - Saturday 22 February 2020 - comments {6} - post comment

Augusto De Campos (1980)

01:11 - Saturday 29 January 2011 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "A Short Ballad, 5 Foot 9½"

                                                                                              

Young, gifted and usually unused

That day he scored the goals that won

The final game that won the season

The other champions lifted him up

In the street the cars were honking

He was famous throughout Melbourne

People cheered all his moves after that

When he sobered up he'd had enough 

His knees were shot or his body just said no

He went bush and sat among the trees

The abstraction was finally put to rest

Came down the mountain and took another look

At last got back all his breath and grew his hair long

Started to write his stories and poems

And he started a printing business

Mostly young poetry risking it all.

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)

02:35 - Monday 8 February 2010 - comments {1} - post comment

POEM: "Midnight On Julian's Balcony In Shanghai, Smashed"

                   "I really should go back to Barber School..."

                    -- Doug Sahm (1969)

                                                                                  

Didn't feel your gaze

as fractious security door

or like an iron balcony

till nightime penthouse

was an open moment

rain steadily changing

clothes trying to fly

just fifty meters away

a felicitous cigarette

because of watching you

putting telescope down

at an open window

smoking a cigarette too

and looking at the rain

was falling between us —

later leave the party

almost leave umbrella

say to a passing friend

clearly is hard the getting in

but why so hard the getting out.

 

                                                     ©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)

23:35 - Sunday 7 February 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

A Jack Gilbert Poem (II)

                                                                                    

   

   

  TO KNOW THE INVISIBLE
 
 
The Americans tried and tried to see
the invisible Indians in the deeper jungle
of Brazil. Finally they put things in the clearing
and waited. They waited for months,
maybe for years. Until a knife and a pot
disappeared. They put out other things
and some of those vanished. Then one morning
there was a jungle offering sitting on the ground.
Gradually they began to know the invisible
by the jungle's choices. Even when nothing
replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.
Like the woman you camp outside of, at the five portals.
Attending the conduits that tunnel from the apparatus
down to the capital of her. Through the body
and its weather, to the mind and heart, to the spirit
beyond. To the mystery. And gradually to the ghosts
coming and leaving. To the difference between
the nightingale and the Japanese nightingale
which is not a nightingale. Getting lost in the treachery
of language, waylaid by the rain dancing its pavane
in the bruised light of winter afternoons.
By the flesh, luminous and transparent in the silent
clearing of her. Love as two spirits flickering
at the edge of meeting. An apartment on the third
floor without an elevator, white walls and almost
no furniture. Water seen through pine trees.
Love like the smell of basil. Richness beyond
anyone's ability to cope with. The way love is after fifty.

                                                                                  

(2009)

11:37 - Monday 1 February 2010 - comments {1} - post comment

POEM: "Did You Strangle All Delicacy"

                                                                          pace Thomas Lynch

                                                                                          

I can't help writing this.

I'm sorry. Forgive me.

Did you strangle all delicacy

In a single careless moment?

Did you chase her away with music

You gave her to sit down and listen to

Which alas contained a secret song?

Was your every night a fretful one

When you slept like the grateful dead

Did you punch and kick your legs

As if beauty was still your enemy?

Now of course all demons rest −−

Freedom from her was hard-won.

Though the scratching you begin to hear

Is like a heavy gate upon the skin.

Did you think you could get away with it?

I’m sorry. Forgive me.

I can’t help writing this.

                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                   

©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)

 

03:39 - Friday 29 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

A Thomas Lynch Poem

  

                   

FOR THE EX-WIFE ON THE OCCASION OF HER BIRTHDAY

                                                                                                                     

Let me say outright that I bear you no
unusual malice anymore. Nor
do I wish for you tumors or loose stools,
blood in your urine, oozings from any orifice.
The list is endless of those ills I do not pray befall you:
night sweats, occasional itching, PMS,
fits, starts, ticks, boils, bad vibes, vaginal odors,
emotional upheavals or hormonal disorders;
green discharges, lumps, growths, nor tell-tale signs of gray;
dry heaves, hiccups, heartbreaks, fallen ovaries
nor cramps—before, during, or after. I pray you only
laughter in the face of your mortality
and freedom from the ravages of middle age:
bummers, boredom, cellulite, toxic shock and pregnancies;
migraines, glandular problems, the growth of facial hair,
sagging breasts, bladder infections, menopausal rage,
flatulence or overdoses, hot flashes or constant nausea,
uterine collapse or loss of life or limb or faith
in the face of what might seem considerable debilities.
Think of your life not as half-spent but as half-full
of possibilities. The Arts maybe, or
Music, Modern Dance, or Hard Rock Videos.
Whatever, this is to say I hereby recant
all former bitterness and proffer only all the best
in the way of Happy Birthday wishes.
I no longer want your mother committed,
your friends banished, your donkey lovers taken out and shot
or spayed or dragged behind some Chevrolet of doom.
I pray you find that space or room or whatever it is
you and your shrink have always claimed you’d need
to spread your wings and realize your insuperable potential.
Godspeed is what I say, and good credentials:
what with your background in fashions and aerobics,
you’d make a fairly bouncy brain surgeon
or well-dressed astronaut or disc jockey.
The children and I will be watching with interest
and wouldn’t mind a note from time to time
to say you’ve overcome all obstacles this time;
overcome your own half-hearted upbringing,
a skimpy wardrobe, your lowly self-esteem,
the oppression of women and dismal horoscopes;
overcome an overly dependent personality,
stretch marks, self-doubt, a bad appendix scar,
the best years of your life misspent on wifing and mothering.
So let us know exactly how you are once
you have triumphed, after all. Poised and ready
on the brink of, shall we say, your middle years,
send word when you have gained by the luck of the draw,
the kindness of strangers, or by dint of will itself
if not great fame then self-sufficiency.
Really, now that I’ve my hard-won riddance of you
signed and sealed and cooling on the books against
your banks and creditors; now that I no
longer need endure your whining discontent,
your daylong, nightlong carping over lost youth,
bum luck, spilt milk, what you might have been,
or pining not so quietly for a new life in
New York with new men; now that I have been
more or less officially relieved of
all those hapless duties husbanding
a woman of your disenchantments came to be,
I bid you No Deposits, No Returns,
but otherwise a very Happy Birthday.
And while this mayn’t sound exactly like good will
in some important ways it could be worse.
The ancients in my family had a way with words
and overzealous habits of revenge
whereby the likes of you were turned to birds
and made to nest among the mounds of dung
that rose up in the wake of cattle herds
grazing their way across those bygone parishes
where all that ever came with age was wisdom.

                    (1986)

03:22 - Friday 29 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Mahatma J.D. Salinger, R.I.P. (1919-2010)

03:10 - Friday 29 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "The Bravado"

                   for Philip Robert Nash

                                                                                               

Listening to Of Montreal

Their record The Gay Parade

And reading Bolaño's Amulet

Very possibly conflating

The astounding terms of both

There's no story without courage

And so no song without a mask

That cannot be removed —

And all of them wait for fear

Churning permutations of desire

The lists of bravado before we sleep

That are universally troublesome

Shall we write about writing?

Terror befalling the unbefallen

Please don't make me laugh

Unless you are laughing too.

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2010)

 

 

01:53 - Tuesday 26 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXXII)

Currently reading:

Roberto Bolaño (CHL), Amulet, 1999 (tr. Chris Andrews 2006)

Currently listening:

Of Montreal (USA), The Gay Parade, 1999

 

01:03 - Monday 25 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "Everything"

I wouldn't joke about this. Though maybe it's best to keep the process to yourself — at least till the collectors come. The streets clean again for a day, maybe we dream it doesn't happen -- or if it did, then we'll only have been dreaming of some other place. You know how it goes.

            Natura Morta. Garbage lying in the streets, loose, no bins.

            Sun is rising. Rats are still. This picture is without smell.

            But at midnight the work began, accumulation reviewed

            for what waste would be turned into hunger. Cats agree.

            Furtive looks from out of nowhere people will admit,

            who only wish for disappearance, left at the side of the road.

            We mostly don't know any better now. We throw away

            in equal amounts what we love and hate and fear too late

            and so it rots. So much late heat it makes: perfect comment.

            And other rats that scavenge after? We don’t believe in that.

            Sun rises faster. Dogs are moving too, looking and judging,

            experience that wasn’t theirs but they try hard to want it.

            Before collection. Before anticipation, the sweepers' carts

            and big trucks, the recycling starts. An Easter-time of insects

            to make the refuse-body One, spirits a-buzzing, lives afresh.

            There’s argument. Purposes conflict. Sun is higher than ever.

            The goal has been dispersed. The garbage has walked away.

            How else to measure the soul that’s lost, than when all is still?

            When Morning comes, the streets eventually swept of us,

            the nocturnal organization of vehicles disconnected, down

            we climb from the bed where we had written of paradise.

            Maybe. Walking down an alley last night. Ripped of memory,

            the key ingredients gone, one word came a-hastening of love

            so ordinary now it's missed. Creatures gather everything.

 

   ©ROB SCHACKNE (2007)

 

01:00 - Monday 25 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

"SNAKE WINE"

 

  

Snake Wine is a 100-page selection of Rob Schackne's

China poems written between 2002-2006. Readers,

reviewers and publishers are all most cordially invited

to reach out to: robschackne@hotmail.com.

About him, even allowing for fabrication in matters

biographical, this much we know is probably true:

Born in New York in the middle of the last century

during a relatively peaceful era, growing up

there and in several South American countries,

this continued in Barbados, in Spain, Switzerland,

the U.S. again, and then Australia — which

last place finally took him in. He attended a few

universities, serving a complicated apprenticeship

in the humanities. He says he enjoys the unusual

insights of intelligent discourse. He now works as a

Foreign Expert EFL teacher in a big city in China.

There were many sports once, viz. track and

field, ice-hockey, rock-climbing, Goju-ryu karate,

Alpine skiing, squash, scuba diving, soccer,

middle-distance running and long-distance

bushwalking. He now plays (mostly) respectable

chess and pool. He listens to The Grateful Dead.

He claims he can read Shakespeare in the original.

His adult son Stewart lives in Melbourne. 

E basta così.

 

11:15 - Wednesday 20 January 2010 - comments {3} - post comment

POEM: "The Bones Of Fish"

This one could be read in the latest historical context of recent and

on-going searches for lost relatives — but then again, it might not.

 

Indented are the tiny bones

In the hapless fossil record

Vibrating an irritation

Down strange countless years — 

A teenage boy holds

An exceptional surprise

The skeleton remains

Of a nervous spinal system;

Maybe unpredictably

Balanced with a tear

Everyone eschews their memory

Leaves old things undigested —

He feels maybe he can’t love fish

Frantic in understatement

Until he can hear their bones

Perfecting the continuous wave

Man, that system was really working

Crazy and open like a swirling sea

But when waters receded

Landing ancestors high and dry

They gave their augury to the earth

Left their lives behind on stone

Like the teeth of a billion frustrations —

Or nothing if not in the shape of bones.

 

                                                  ©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)

02:41 - Saturday 16 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

A Derrick C. Brown Poem

             

 

          Punish Children

Who will curl forth honesty
and say that they would like to send their child back
to that sudden baby cave?

I fear having a boy
fore seeing the day I will stare into his skin
and have to say:
“You might unravel, son.
Do not try to prepare for this.
Know that I don’t know shit. No one does.”

I fear having a girl the most,
who will ask me what it’s like to die
and I will have to reply:

“Lose your virginity
and fall asleep in pain.
Be better than me.”

If that small, hairless, voteless tyrant says:

                “Stop talking like you’re trying, Pop.
                 What is it really like to die?
                 Speak plain.”

I will say: 
                 “Love writing with all your heart. 
                  Then have kids 
                  and write no more,
                  you wretched, screeching Leprechaun.”

She has that laugh ‘cause she has my sense of humor.
How strange that the woman you always wanted to meet
came out of your own body.

How egotistical and pure.

My past rushes through her like a river after winter.

I hope she fails history.
 

 

(2004)

                                         www.brownpoetry.com

15:32 - Friday 15 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "The Housekeeping"

We all know people with an unlucky compulsion for public order. Some are clearly mad. But many are slobs who, if you ever circled back around, typically leave their tools, their machinery and their cars in bad shape, skidmarks in the toilet bowl—and a brief but unconsolable sorrow all over the world...  

 

Victims of housekeeping

Know where everything should be

It's the dirt, never the politics

That is the enemy of order

A thousand years of genetic code

Exciting right angles and dust 

Swirling straight up into heaven —

But I, in my truce with cockroaches

Will go straight to hell someday

Just like your perfect mother said

Where I'll sleep in an unmade bed

And wear yesterday's socks again.

 

My old trousers are neat pleated

Accumulations of the world —

Lord, I didn't wash the hands

That trouble my neighbour's sleep

How do unregenerates run free?

One day at a time, piece by piece

Putting coffee spoons in the honey

Errant coins spent under cushions

Strange notes to remind you forgot

The dirty clothes waiting on the floor

The dust that beckons outside the door

For just one more chance at you.

 

                                        ©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)

10:56 - Wednesday 13 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "I Gave It To Her After Lunch"

I know that in the Pataphysics Dept. they study the science of exceptions. Now they're even thinking that exile might remove some key elements of fate. But this one, hell, I don't even get the title.

                                                                                                            

She looks towards the window

and she says it's very windy

I say please look at me —

you know I'm not a shipping magnate

we have studied Mme Butterfly together

I hope I'm not a secret agent

(I neither encourage nor prevent)

true enough there's too much rain now

any dreamer can skid on their ass

slip up looking at a window glass

for wisdom and final disaffection

God and the smudges last a lifetime

the best minds of our generation

busy washing themselves off

pay for the lunch we didn't finish

and the many hands stretched outside

to the best minds of their generation

beg for one long birthday noodle

a logistical pot and electrics —

we get up from the busy table

on a day won't be disconnected

from the best ends of us stretched out

flying a kite straight up in the rain

still don't know yet where it went.

 

 ©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

23:12 - Monday 11 January 2010 - comments {2} - post comment

Águas De Março

             

           Águas de Março by Tom Jobim

Águas de Março "É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho É um resto de toco, é um pouco sozinho É um caco de vidro, é a vida, é o sol É a noite, é a morte, é o laço, é o anzol É peroba do campo, é o nó da madeira Caingá candeia, é o matita-pereira É madeira de vento, tombo da ribanceira É o mistério profundo, é o queira ou não queira É o vento ventando, é o fim da ladeira É a viga, é o vão, festa da cumeeira É a chuva chovendo, é conversa ribeira Das águas de março, é o fim da canseira É o pé, é o chão, é a marcha estradeira Passarinho na mão, pedra de atiradeira É uma ave no céu, é uma ave no chão É um regato, é uma fonte, é um pedaço de pão É o fundo do poço, é o fim do caminho No rosto o desgosto, é um pouco sozinho É um estrepe, é um prego, é uma ponta, é um ponto É um pingo pingando, é uma conta, é um conto É um peixe, é um gesto, é uma prata brilhando É a luz da manhã, é o tijolo chegando É a lenha, é o dia, é o fim da picada É a garrafa de cana, o estilhaço na estrada É o projeto da casa, é o corpo na cama É o carro enguiçado, é a lama, é a lama É um passo, é uma ponte, é um sapo, é uma rã É um resto de mato, na luz da manhã São as águas de março fechando o verão É a promessa de vida no teu coração É uma cobra, é um pau, é João, é José É um espinho na mão, é um corte no pé São as águas de março fechando o verão É a promessa de vida no teu coração É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho É um resto de toco, é um pouco sozinho É um passo, é uma ponte, é um sapo, é uma rã É um belo horizonte, é uma febre terçã São as águas de março fechando o verão É a promessa de vida no teu coração"

Waters of March It's stick, it's stone, It's the end of the road It's a stump left behind, It's a little alone It's a shard of glass, It is life, it's the sun It is night, it is death, It's the snare, it's the fishhook It's peroba of the field, It’s the knot in the wood Lamp caingá tree, It's the matita-pereira tree It's wind in the wood, Falls of the ravine It's the profound mystery, It's what you wish or you don’t It's the wind blowing, It's the end of the slope It's the beam, it's the span, The new roof party It's the rain raining, It’s riverbank talk Of the waters of March, It's the end of the struggle It's the foot, it's the ground, It's the walk on the road Small bird in the hand, A slingshot stone It’s a bird in the sky, It’s a bird on the ground It's a creek, it's a fountain, It's a piece of bread It's the bottom of the well, It's the end of the way In the face the annoyance, It's a little lonely It's a thorn, it's a nail, It's a point, it’s a dot It's a drop dripping, It's an tally, it’s a tale It's a fish, it’s a gesture, It's a silver shining It's the morning’s light, It's the brick arriving It's the firewood, it's the day, It's the end of the trail It's the bottle of liquor, Splinter in the road It’s the house’s design, It's the body in bed It's the broken-down car, It's the mud, it's the mud It's a footstep, it's a bridge, It's a toad, it's a frog It's a hair left behind, In the morning’s light They are the waters of March Closing the summer It's the promise of life In your heart It's a snake, it’s a stick, It's John, it's Joseph It's a thorn in the hand, It's the cut on the foot They are the waters of March Closing the summer It's the promise of life In your heart It's stick, it's stone, It's the end of the road It's a resting stump, It's a little alone It's a footstep, a bridge, It's a toad, it's a frog It's a beautiful horizon, It’s a trembling fever They are the waters of March Closing the summer It's the promise of life In your heart.

 

               http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waters_of_March

 

20:48 - Monday 11 January 2010 - comments {1} - post comment

A Friedrich Hölderlin Poem

        'Another day'

                                                                                              

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere

Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

          

—Tr. David Constantine

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)

 

 

01:06 - Monday 11 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXXI)

Currently reading:

Roberto Bolaño (CHL), Last Evenings On Earth, 1997 (tr. Chris Andrews 2006)

Currently listening:

Midlake (USA), The Courage Of Others, 2010

 

10:17 - Sunday 10 January 2010 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "Three Minutes With Reality"

 

                                                           after Astor Piazzolla

                                                                                                             

It takes so little to get the three minutes
Or so much depending on where you are
Those three minutes might be sombre
They could be ecstatic or just be quiet
The only trick is to be there at the time

After that they who look back will say
Your life is never going to be the same
Three minutes of a battle or a burn or love
You were outside it and now you're in
Well what do they know it's not a club

You survive that and you survive the next
And the three minutes fall on like the rain
That keeps on getting louder and then it stops
Three minutes with reality float by like clouds
But I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea.

                                                                                                                                             

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

10:29 - Friday 1 January 2010 - comments {2} - post comment

A Jorge Luis Borges Poem

         

              Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
For all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

                                         

                                     —Tr. Alastair Reid

                                                 

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

 

10:00 - Sunday 27 December 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

POEM: "Her Comment On A Sad Excess"

                                                                                            

I had already known her

the most beautiful woman

in the world as shocking

as a very dangerous wire

exposed and waiting for a child —

she hates that she was so unready

sometimes weeping in the night

there is always so much wanting

she can't believe she's so different

drinking whiskey and choler

pleading to the sadly devout

someday they will really see

their baffled glasses failed them

and finally woken they'll lean

towards another beautiful light

where they forget she isn't there.

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

09:28 - Sunday 27 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

From David Eagleman's "Sum" (2009)

 
 In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. 
                                                                                                                                           

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. 
                                                                                                                                               

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events.

                                                                                                                                 In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.

                                                                                                                                           

—David Eagleman, From "Sum" (2009)

11:56 - Saturday 26 December 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

A Giacomo Leopardi Poem

 

          L'infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De'll ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E'l naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

                                                                                                  

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

                                                       

http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-leopardi-1.html

 

 

10:25 - Thursday 24 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "These Wings Of Desire"

                                          for Wim Wenders

I really don't care anymore.

My thoughts are debasing me

And I can no longer quiz

A smiling world with my songs —

Rocks below in the water and the wind

I have been falling all my life

There will be an end to this descent.

                                                                                                    

An old man is watching me carefully

Just twenty cold meters away —

He sits like me on the cliff edge

I must be still to get rid of him

And watch no more of this lonely world

There is no point in seagulls wheeling.

Suddenly he is sitting next to me.

                                                                                              

Offer him a job in my little shop

Maybe introduce him to a lovely girl

If his constitution can stand it

There looks to be enough room

How do you live in this world without desire

When the stuff of stars is in your veins

Distant, cold and fine, but there?

                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                    

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

 

10:56 - Wednesday 23 December 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXX)

Currently reading:

Ron Slate (USA), The Great Wave, 2009

Currently listening:

Arvo Pärt (EST), Orient & Occident, 2002

 

10:36 - Wednesday 23 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "It's Almost Christmas"

                                                                                                                                          

I'm listening to La Bartoli

Sing magnificently of the castrato

And damned if I know that I can

Get my ears past any barber's knife

That promised to settle the future —

Why does a woman singing of dreams

Touch my battered soul like this?

It's almost Christmas this is true

When we hardly look a beggar in the eye

But adjust the sack on our shoulders

March on there's a music we didn't hear —

Beneath my gods the sweet angels

Have never stopped their singing.

I probably wouldn't mention this joy

If today I hadn't seen so much kindness

Or if out of the corner of my eye

I didn't see you coming toward me

A voice as painful as all others

Speaking like some other angel

Moving somewhat awkwardly.

                                                                                                                                               

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

13:52 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "A Minor Whisky"

I've always thought the Rastafari have it about right. Even though I'm privileged and white, I still write quite alot about Babylon — if you don't know approximately where that is, then you might have a little trouble getting out of there and into here. As Max Romeo sings in "One Step Forward":  "This is the time of decision/What is your plan?"

         

Temperance is the measure

You take before you go out

Weighing how little was decided

How often you bit your tongue

And didn’t argue about the seasons

A minor whisky is what you call it

Kaliyuga is what the others say is left

Four hundred twenty-six thousand

Nine hundred and eighty years

Of worsening misplaced zeal

Like the man said, I don’t think I can

Put up with this shit for much longer

How can the end of days last so long

How much else will intoxicate a man

As he walks straight in chattering crowds

Pausing before the massive walls of ire

Everyone is charging everybody else

For distractions no one can live without

If the truth, they say, lacks any substance

How blessèd then is the minute without heart?

 

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2008)

11:14 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

L'Angina #16: John Martin, "The Fall Of Babylon" (1831)

                                                                                                                                  

The vengeance of the Lord, the fall of the proud, the desolation of the rich and

powerful: but, beyond all these, surely a profound, passionate, poetic pleasure

in ruin as such. Out come the screech-owls, the dragons, the satyrs, the bitterns,

the serpents, the jackals, the bats, even the moles, all the familiar creatures of

ruin that haunt demolished cities and blooming fancy; the vineyards are trodden

down and laid waste, the briars and thorns spring up, houses, now great and

fair, shall stand desolate, the Lord shall hiss for flies from Egypt and bees

from Assyria, and they shall come and stay. As for Babylon… “wild beasts

of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures,

and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there, and the wild beasts

of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant

palaces: and her time is near to come… Thy pomp is brought down to

the graves, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee

and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer,

son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground… I will also

make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water: and I will

sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts.”

                                                                                                           

—Rose Macaulay, from "Pleasure Of Ruins" (1996)

 

11:08 - Thursday 17 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "The List At The End Of The Year Is Gathered Like The Sun"

 

                                                                                                  

It's a fine pastime, putting
together lists of things
you really like. This book
that chapter, another verse
you don't quite remember

Always just beneath
the bough of breaking tastes
that go this way and that
it's all a man can do to keep up
with her latest best book

Listening to a dream
recounted past good sense
we have to listen well 
but you know a picnic 
isn't exactly a fine meal

It's not actually a list
you can sit on for long either
there are ants on the way
one of them has already arrived
damn it's got a piece of paper too.

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

02:14 - Wednesday 16 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

The Road Goes On Forever (The Party Never Ends)

  You know—it might not always be obvious, but I do give

some thought to this little site of mine. Sure, it's kind of a feverish literary

diary, into which I also put some of my own work as it gets done. But

one of the chief incidentals of this computer age is how much you can

learn (about as much as you can take) from some half-smart surfing.

There really are alot of terrific new poets out there. I say new because

I'd never heard of them before. Though I can add to these pages no more

than a tiny amount of the poetry of merit I fall across, I want for those

poems what any of their hard-luck writers want—for them to keep on

being read by the steadfast few of you who still value poetry. Having

served up this blog for over two years, now it's another type of Magic

Pudding, the poetry growing, expanding on into the music

and some of the other arts I understand some. While I wouldn't claim that 

The Tao That Can Be Named... has really got very much of a theme to

it—still, this being a rather instructive life, there it goes where it has to go.

Please keep working your own thing. Be of good heart. The work is

important because in the conduct of the life we have now there isn't

really a better alternative outside of the Small Lotus Cave. (I don't

know about you, but I'm not ready for that yet.) It's true enough that

writing all the way out here I sometimes feel like a banana without

a monkey—maybe you do too—so your support is very appreciated.

It helps to feed that energy that feeds each one of us. Thank you all.

Namaste. Good night, Julie.

 

12:35 - Monday 14 December 2009 - comments {3} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXIX)

Currently reading:

Nick Laird (GBR), Glover's Mistake, 2009

Currently listening:

Kid Cudi (USA), Man On The Moon: The End Of Day, 2009

 

11:51 - Monday 14 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "Moonlit Night On Floor"

                                                                                              

Look at the center of things

Where you haven't been before 

Half dreams of seeing sorrow

Half adept at believing delight —

When she slaps you in the face

Every time she climaxes

It's just a reflex action she says

And she always says she's so sorry

The mirror is delivered a little late 

Of course you never see it coming

On the tatami mat and futon 

Where your travelling dreams 

Have rolled you far into the kitchen

Ten feet away on a hard foreign floor

And when you wake up with the moon

She has you covered with a quilt

She is snuggled close to you — 

An alley cat is looking in the window.

                                                                                                                                

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

01:57 - Thursday 10 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

A Xi Chuan Poem

             

           

              Ark


One stormy night I will open by myself
The lonely locked room beside me

I may find a candle-stub, a box of matches
A bolt of spiritual lightning to set me shivering

A stone sinks in the ocean five hundred metres off shore
The soul of a bird nesting in the cliffs is fervent and imperilled

Yes, the ocean is nearby, one stormy night
I will listen to the pounding of the waves and light the candle

Write life’s sun on the land
And the death-date of all things

But I am a young man walking towards the sea
After experiencing hardships I will be fully fledged

Three knocks on the door reverberate in my heart
The tide leaps onto the sandy shore like a great host of turtles

This night’s dagger, this flotsam from a seaborne ship
I pat the ancient ark, the bright moon hangs high

One stormy night I will open by myself
The lonely locked room beside me


                         —Tr. Tao Naikan and Tony Prince

Xi Chuan


http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15454

21:11 - Wednesday 9 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

A Joel Brouwer Poem

         

                                                                                   

             Lesser Evils            

                                                                                                       

After a morning of work in separate rooms
she said she was going to the municipal pool
and he said he would walk along the river
for a while before they met back for their lunch
of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went
to the lobby of the Hôtel du Panthéon
to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup
of the Irish tea she liked and he to
the little church of St. Médard. A couple
old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews.
He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone.
And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes
were filled with kids from the elementary school
or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said
a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex
with the curtains drawn against the chemistry
students conducting their experiments in the building
across the street. Incremental triumphs
of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings
they liked to fire champagne corks at the vast
darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice
startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe.
Turning back to their tumors with relief.

                                                                                

(2009)

 

              http://www.ronslate.com/and_so_poems_joel_brouwer_four_way_books

 

15:59 - Friday 4 December 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

A Daniel Jonas Poem

 

                                                                                                         

The electric lights, it may well be that the electric lights
will prevent the autumn fall
and the bird call at the window,
grey as an overcoat.

The jaw squeezes a verb
and no bird appears,
nothing happens: it’s the autumn
of the falling leaves, that’s all –
no verb can thus fall.

Only the bent,
welded, muffled, cold sound
of a tolling bell,

it may well be that the electric lights
and the stone blocks for example
may well prevent
the irregularity of pavements or the crushing
of hours against each other

it may well be that the shells
of the umbrellas that blur the city
may well draw your name
like in a musical

it may well be that the shops will stay
and the stone slabs will go
and it may well not be
that the rain will insist
in such an iniquitous way.


©Daniel Jonas, 2005
©Trans. Ana Hudson, 2009

 http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=15443

01:09 - Saturday 28 November 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

A Robert Creeley Poem

 

                                                             

The Rain

                                 

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

 

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

 

11:47 - Friday 27 November 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXVIII)

Currently reading:

Joseph O'Neill (IRL), Netherland, 2008

Currently listening:

The Bad Plus (USA), Prog, 2007

15:52 - Monday 23 November 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

A W.S. Merwin Poem

01:25 - Friday 20 November 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "Some Old Words On New Music"

                                                                                            

Venus on a clear night. She doesn't blink.

Music lies gently upon the mind

Like light upon a fractious planet.

                                                                                              

John Cage said he explored non-intention.

He composed music but it composed him.

But only two sounds, the high and the low: 

                                                                                              

There's a sound of the crack of rock

Somewhere ahead in the sandy gully

And cicadas rush in to cover the noise —

 

Which sounds shall be prosecuted

Till there is silence at the end of music

Till the just spell of love is a winter breath.

                                                                                               

But what listens to you listening to it?

They all say conserve your energy.

How long do you think that will last?

                                                                                                    

Tonight you stay inside the light

Your heads are turned I think 

As far as memory takes you back.

                                                                                  

Cage asked: Which is more musical:

a truck passing by a factory

or a truck passing by a music school?

                                                                                          

Maybe you know.

 

                                                                                                                           

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

 

15:38 - Saturday 14 November 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

Boris's Book List

...in no real order, no order of merit, no publisher or publication dates:

J.G. Ballard, The Collected Stories of J.G. Ballard

Nick Laird, Glover's Mistake

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

Matthew Eck, The Farther Shore

Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot and The Great Wave

Paul Auster, Invisible

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet and By Night in Chile and Last Evenings on Earth

James Agee, A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text

Ferenc Karinthy, Metropole

This will likely take him the better part of a year to get through. But it's likely better not to ask. (Update: Be it known that the esteemed California Mark has once again very kindly ferried back another weighty collection, which is now looking somewhat bemused in China.)

04:21 - Saturday 14 November 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

A Michelangelo Antonioni Film

The Passenger, the 1975 Antonioni film also known as Profession: Reporter, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, apparently protected from general release for years by rights-owner Nicholson, was finally let loose several years ago. I've watched this DVD three times in the past few days, and I think it's a ripper in every way. There's plenty of Lacanian analysis to be had, if you call that fun — but you'll find no spoilers here. Its dense action concerns escape, subterfuge, and no redemption; while its subtext concerns escape, subterfuge, and...almost no redemption. As unredemptive as the film is, Antonioni still gives his wise camera-eyes a regenerative chance to mirror the inaction and the action, and invites us to feel the motivational edge of its characters' drive for a kind of authenticity. Should the premise of giving up your own identity for someone else's doesn't resonate, it's quite likely that you'll feel able to identify with some of its special moments, whether it be in an uncomfortable and unpredictable relationship, on a road that goes on forever, or in the frustration with the heat and the buglife. "I used to be somebody else...but I traded myself in." So says David Locke, the unhappy protagonist. But telling ourselves that we wouldn't be him for a billion feckless bucks won't help us very much. Actually all of us are Locke. You won't miss the slow politics in the ending. Indemnity for faithlessness on the cusp of becoming a cause — where we imagine that in a small place on this planet, time was again so compressed by hope into memory that death itself could not exist. Whose revenge was that? It was probably only the living who missed it. Hell. Give it ten stars, each with a planet with more intelligent life than our own.

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

04:09 - Saturday 31 October 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

A Tony Brown Poem

     

                                                              

       

          Dispatch from the Home Front: Halloween 2001

                                                                                                

like every other year I sit outside with a guitar
while kids roam in small packs
from lit door to lit door

the costumes tonight are not that frightening

angels and fairies and superheroes abound
a few bloodsuckers and ghouls
a sprinkling of skeletons
no terrorists

the adults pretend to be scared

jessie (the giraffe from across the street)
solemnly hands me M & Ms from her stash
when I put the Snickers in her pumpkin
“honey,” I tell her
“it’s not a trade – it‘s a gift”
and she solemnly takes them back

the young girl in the bathrobe and curlers
wearing the sign that says
I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON
says to me
“I want to hear you play your prettyful music”

so
I hand her candy
and I pick up my guitar
to play a song appropriate to the season
(a song by the Grateful Dead)
for this world’s recent ghosts

this world
where unimaginable ashes
sift down on children’s beds

in one part of this world
the very rocks and baseballs
smell of abrasives, jet fuel, burning rubber, corpses

in another part of this world
they are making the mail glow white
long enough to kill what lives on the words

in another part of this world
this guitar would be
illegal

in that country a shrouded woman
has been carefully picking food from a minefield
(food that was airdropped in my name)

she runs and lifts her child from the ground
raising his head high up onto her shoulder
vainly trying to keep the frightening blood from spilling too much

it will take her years to fall asleep again

when she does fall asleep
she will dream of picking up a yellow bomblet
wrapping it in swaddling clothes
suckling it until it blooms hot and bright

but she will not cry
as she holds him in that dream

we all dream that dream these days
we all hold our children closer
while holding back tears

a dream like that
is not a gift
it is a trade
we have all already given
more than enough in return for this one
and you do not let go of your tears
when tears are all you have left

Halloween night
I am pushing aside the veil between the worlds
a mourning person waiting for dawn
pretending to be scared to cover real fear
while I give sweets and prettyful music
to my neighbors’children

we are all a long way from home

if I knew the way
I would take you home

 

01:04 - Saturday 31 October 2009 - comments {1} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXVII)

Currently reading:

Gerald Seymour (GBR), The Untouchable, 2001

Currently listening:

Horace Andy/Ashley Beedle (JAM), Inspiration Information Vol. 2, 2009

   

19:03 - Friday 30 October 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "The Liberation"

                                                         for David Sylvian & Jack Gilbert & Z

I saw it I heard how you rejected her

Because one breast had been removed

She sent you a perfumed box of dead bees

Each one laid out with precious oils

I heard how you gave your dying wife

Perfect flowers and the falling petals

Kept her awake they reminded her of you

                                                                                                         

The massive Tibetan thangka I gave you

Which I asked that you take away from China

To show your very ailing mother in Kobe, 

Keep safe between small mountains and the sea —

Why did you do that to me? You asked later

Miles west in Shanghai along the boulevard

Connected to some other perfidy of mine.

                                                                                                           

How one hand can give and another disregard

That intricate picture of awful trial and liberation

I did not want to fall into the hands of deaf ears —

You loved the sun and mourned your mother's passing

But there was really no answer I could give you then

Now I say that not every wall is the same, my love

And there are still a few things Buddha hasn't told us.

                                        ©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

21:30 - Saturday 24 October 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

Terracotta Typewriter Issue #3

http://www.tctype.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Fall09.pdf

 

21:26 - Friday 23 October 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "Johnson's Glass House"

                                                                                                                        

I live not according to the glass walls

in our Glass House, but in accordance with

the cool and visible perfection that boils

inside my bedroom and outside in the big trees

you can see. It's the living room's opposite.

I am not Johnson. But this is my home. 

My glass house become a prayer of presence,

that it stick my feet upon the marble steps

and I shall bump my nose against the wall; 

that I see into all the rooms I wasn’t meant to

and I'll look through glass as a meditation

of an emptiness I never knew before. Focus eyes

and unfocus them till I see the parting inbetween.

Reality in architecture? Who could build the thing?

I did not invent this space. I have played with space.

From still-curtained rooms on moonless nights

the boys and girls from the town dare themselves

to creep far into our lucid property. They watch. 

They believe they can't be seen. Finally, because  

living slowly in a glass house will remind you of fire,

how much presence born of great desire and cooling

longs for this transparency — that all, all will be clear.

 

©ROB SCHACKNE (2007)

 

 

19:12 - Sunday 4 October 2009 - comments {2} - post comment

Where's Wal Now? (XXVI)

Currently reading:

Jack Gilbert (US), The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, 2008

Currently listening:

Goran Bregovic (BIH), Ederlezi, 1998

 

20:12 - Monday 28 September 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

POEM: "To The Third Man"

   

                                                                                                  

O it was only in the everyday it was

Pointing the way they said it was himself

Who never crossed against the slow lights,

Who never took the last chocolate

From the box, unless it was offered —

They said strange such a man became a poet.

But he meandered and he learned quite well

The Third Man factor, how pleasure defers

In the expense of a holy misery, or even love, 

The mysterious source he sometimes sensed

Counting one-two past everything he knew —

Days are knife-sharp and nights are thunder.

He crawled to his window and looked at the stars

In the morning dark, aware that there was a form

Always within his reach, but there was a form

It was touched by, that knew when he was reached

He would skip across the street and take the jewel

Never look back a moment or give time thanks.

                                                                                                                                     

©ROB SCHACKNE (2009)

12:08 - Monday 28 September 2009 - comments {0} - post comment

L'Angina #15: James Ensor, "Skeletons Fighting Over A Smoked Herring" (1891)

20:22 - Sunday 20 September 2009 - comments {2} - post comment