chris at
12:45 AM
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from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Series * :
12
Will transformation. Oh be crazed for the fire
in which something boasting with change is recalled
from you; that designing spirit, the earthly's master,
loves nothing as much as the turning point of the soaring symbol.
What wraps itself up in endurance is already the rigid:
does it feel safe in that unpretentious gray shelter?
Beware, from afar the hardest warns the hard.
And, oh -- the upswing of an absent hammer!
Whoever pours himself out like a spring, he's known by Knowing;
and she guides him enthralled through the serene Creation
that often ends with beginning and begins with ending.
Every happy space they wander through, astounded,
is a child or a grandchild of Departure. And the transformed
Daphne, feeling herself laurel, wills that you change into wind.
(161)
* translated by A. Poulin, Jr., in Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus(Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 2005)
chris at
12:35 AM
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chris at
12:27 AM
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Tuesday, January 01, 2008
from Wassily Kandinsky's Klange [Sounds], a 1912 text of poetry/ experimental poetics * :
OPEN
Now disappearing slowly in green grass.
Now sticking in grey muck.
Now disappearing slowly in white snow.
Now sticking in grey muck.
Lay long: big long black reeds.
Lay long.
Long reeds.
Reeds.
Reeds.
(31)
* Wassily Kandinsky, Sounds [orig. Klange], trans. Elizabeth R. Napier (Yale UP, 1981)
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3:57 PM
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2:15 PM
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2:11 PM
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2:07 PM
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2:05 PM
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chris at
1:59 PM
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from Canadian minimalist painter/writer, Agnes Martin * :
. . .
More people at an earlier age see the conqueror in themselves
then see the way out in another process
the real defeat of ego in which we have no part
The dissolution of ego in reality as it was in the beginning
as it was before we were separate and insular
the process we call destiny
in which we are the material to be dissoved
We eat
We procreate
We die
We can see the process and recognize suffering as the defeat of
ego by the process of destiny
We can relinquish pride, conquest, remorse and resolution
inevitably as destiny unfolds
Cradled on the mountains I can rest
Solitude and freedom are the same
under every fallen leaf
. . .
(42)
* I was in the Dallas Museum of Art the other day and picked up this lovely book by Martin, WRITINGS (, a book of her thoughts that was assembled to accompany a 1992 exhibition in Germany of her work: AGNES MARTIN: PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER, 1960-1989, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, January 19 to March 15, 1992.
chris at
4:05 AM
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Happy 2008 to Y'all!
