Category: Literature

Poetry, Pictures ‘n Politics

Headline about sums up my life. Forty (or so) years ago poet Philip Whalen wrote:

Our main difficulty: fear and distrust of freedom

In America we’ve been fighting each other 100 years
We pretend we’re unimaginably rich
But we’re poor and afraid of the poor who must become
The Army to defend us against right and wrong

The real shame of America is the lack of an anti-clerical
Movement or party. All parties try to compound
With invisible State Protestant Church that theoretically
Doesn’t exist. Rubes who think of themselves as
Members in good standing are bilked and robbed

When did the dumb-bunny bomb first hit U.S.A?
How come everybody appreciated it so much?
Almost all Americans aged 4 to 100
Have the spiritual natures of Chicago policemen

Singer/songwriter Shawn Mullins performed at the historic Pabst Theatre Sunday, 9/21/08 (with Dar Williams headlining). Shawn reinforced my belief in the power of a talented story teller with a deep heart and a guitar. His character sketches bring to mind the people we’ve all met along life’s highway.

Selected “photographic” lyrics from Another Look by Shawn Mullins

Another look into her might just free me now.
I feel the drowning pounding of her pain
and her dreams like eyes,
as she looks into my sin.
So knowing where and why she’s looking through my window.
The cameraman wants to take her picture.
Now words spill out of hearts onto the stone,
and her image ties the knot of never knowing
the whole truth from lies.
Feels like I’m just now showing pictures to the man
whose dreams are realized.
He’s older now but he’s got newborn eyes.
Another look into her might just set me free.
I took her like a shot into my arm

Keep looking. If you can’t photograph; write. If you can’t write; draw. If you can’t draw; pickup a musical instrument.

“The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.” — Brooks Atkinson – 1951, Once Around the Sun

some times the impulse
simply will not manifest
as on this foggy day
—
beauty seen yet no
proof beyond an impression
left on aging eyes
—
her youth and allure
spilled atop the lunch counter
splashing all over us

Perhaps the virtue of the written word is not the power it has to transform the author into a poet, but the impulse it gives him to keep expressing thoughts; however feeble.

Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist Manifesto

More from Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist Manifesto, “Risk is always elsewhere. The true poet is always leaving himself behind. Never too long in the same place, like guerrilla fighters, flying saucers, and the white eyes of lifers. LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND, AGAIN. GO OUT ON THE ROADS.”

“I dreamt that a man looked back, over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and that his glance was hard as steel but still fragmented itself in multiple glances each time more innocent, each time more destitute.

I dreamt that a storm of ghostly numbers was the only thing left behind by mankind three billion years after the earth had ceased to exist.” — R. Bolaño, “A journey through literature”

those ones and zeros
blowing about the winter
without human kind

words bouncing off visions

“I trust pictures, but no pictures in my world – because I know what goes on.” — Naomi Campbell

So, sitting in the kitchen, reading The Nation, or rather articles within, which refer to the life, times and work of Roberto Bolaño, who said, “Then what is writing of quality? Well, what it’s always been: to know how to thrust your head into the darkness, know how to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.” among other groups of words, mostly in variations of Spanish.

this spring visioning
implores me to discover
infrarealist

(click images for larger view)

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while discovering
a new light always springing
within my world view

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