Tags: nicole dextras

I started binding this book in 1607. The Goddess of Immortality came to me a few days ago. She said I have allowed you to live more than four centuries and yet you have not finished binding this prodigious book. She said she will cut my thread of life in less than a century. So I quickly got to work. I worked hard. I worked day and night. And now the book is completely bound and finished. What shall I do now that I am a mortal? 





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Tags: book binding

I finished binding this book called Trains Go Fast. A correspondence with Lucy. All texts printed on archival Fabriano and archival ink. It took me seven years to complete the printing & binding.

Tags: trains go fast

256: To Return to the Urges Unconscious of Their Beginning
"To Return to the Urges Unconscious of Their Beginning"
Pham Tien Duat

I want to return to the first urges, those urges that seemed so unconscious of their beginnings.
Urges that were eager to admire the first pen in my life my mother brought me when I was a child.
Urges that were the radiant new shirt of days in my poor village.
I want to return to those urges so unconscious of their beginnings.
Urges that were my astonishment at seeing the first feeding breast and the 1001st nostalgia that seemed almost too much to bear.
Urges that were the first naive and truthful song a soldier of the 308th division taught me in his loving arm.
Urges that were my first sensations at seeing my poems in print. How happy and anxious my heart that moment seeing the small creatures of handwriting incarnated into the dragons of type.
Urges that were the first insult about my poems that I heard from the mouth of one who didn't know me.
I want to return to those first urges so unconscious of their origins.
So I need no longer know which urges are introverted and which are extroverted.
So I need no longer know which poetry must be connected to policy and which must be away from policy.
So I need no longer know which poetry must be in established patterns as in "North of the River," or must be in free fashion as in "Cochinchina."
And last, so I need no longer know, can poems be sold, and can they be sold at a profit.

translated from the Vietnamese by Ngo Vinh Hai and Kevin Bowen

 

 

Courtesy of exceptindreams

I have been reading a lot of poetry....and feel slightly fiction-deprived.
Curious as to what others might suggest...
Something light and meaningful, cheeky and crazy, fanciful and petty, kinky or morbid, or all of the above would be nice.

It's all Tony's fault.



Also, trafficking this site nearly made me faint:
http://www.mytypewriter.com/

1. My period is 2 days late and getting to three. (I am a slight bit worried.) Could I possibly be pregnant?
2. I went to Blick, our art supply store, to buy Antique Ingres papers to bind some handmade leather books. They decided to stop carrying them :(...so they had to order them via a catalogue for me. The shipping cost was seven times the cost of one paper!!!! They had arches paper but they are so thick and fat...not ideal for making signatures for books.
3. I purchased an airplane ticket to New York flying from the McCarran Airport in Vegas. It will be a direct flight of 4 hours and 51 minutes. Flapping from one coast to another coast can be quite exciting.
4. Does anyone know how to turn a typewriter into a sex object or sex toy? I think typewriters are very sexy...and me thinking of them as an object of extreme concupiscent quality, I thought to ruminate...on other possibilities. My imagination has enervated a bit...so I thought to throw that out there.
5. I have a headache, like a mushroom cloud above my head, dark and onerous. I wonder if drinking Guava tea helps.

Tags: http://www.forumgallery.com/adetail.php?

on p. 13 of Ezra Pound's book....he said and quoted someone significant

2. Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. =
                          Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the
                          body to conceal the defects of the mind.
                                                                                 LAURENCE STERNE


I have no idea what Sterne is saying.

Perhaps Sappho is the first initiator of the "Imagist" movement...

Perhaps things do not make sense any more.  I am lying in my bed eating French baguette and wondering why I am so lonely. I am tired of keeping a positive mindset...I am tired of imagining myself a happy and bold person. Someone who isn't afraid of human beings, of the universe, of rare, abstract emotions. Ones that invade the soul and cripple the spirit.  I feel also very disconnected from everyone and from my community. At first, I try to appear aloof and uncomfortable. Much later, I smile a distant smile. Not entire fake, maybe a coerced smile..

What happens to an individual, you or me, when we have found our purpose in the universe? What do we do?

I discovered the meaning of life a couple of months ago when I descended a hill before entering a very large box.  Oh, no. I didn't enter a sarcophagus. It was where I work.

The meaning of life is 'this or that'.

Simple, isn't it?

It is that simple, my dear soul.