wanting

Descoberta fresca. Fervente de fresca.

Language is nothing but meanings, and
meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts.
Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely
come to terms. They are transitions,
transmutations, the endless radiating of
denotation into relation.
Lyn Hejinian na introdução a The Language of Inquiry

Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance
do livro My Life
(confessing abashed that I could not read more than two lines at a time. breath in. breath out.)

The windows were open and the morning air was, by the smell of lilac and some darker flowering shrub, filled with the brown and chirping trills of birds. As they are if you could have nothing but quiet and shouting. Arts, also, are links. I picture an idea at the moment I come to it, our collision. Once for a time, anyone might have been luck's child. Even rain didn't spoil the barbecue, in the backyard behind a polished traffic, through a landscape, along a shore. Freedom then, liberation later. She came to babysit for us in those troubled years directly from the riots, and she said that she dreamed of the day when she would gun down everyone in the financial district. That single telephone is only one hair on the brontosaurus. The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically. If your dog stays out of the room, you get the fleas. In the lull, activity drops. I'm seldom in my dreams without my children. My daughter told me that at some time in school she had learned to think of a poet as a person seated on an iceberg and melting through it. It is a poetry of certainty. In the distance, down the street, the practicing soprano belts the breeze. As for we who "love to be astonished," money makes money, luck makes luck. Moves forward, drives on. Class background not landscape--still here and there in 1969 I could feel the scope of collectivity. It was the present time for a little while, and not so new as we thought then, the present always after war. Ever since it has been hard for me to share my time. yellow of that sad room was again the yellow of naps, where she waited, restless, faithless, for more days. They say that the alternative for the bourgeoisie was gullibility. Call it water and dogs. Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there. But can one imagine a madman in love. Goodbye; enough that was good. There was a pause, a rose, something on paper. I may balk but I won't recede. Because desire is always embarrassing. At the beach, with a fresh flush. The child looks out. The berries are kept in the brambles, on wires on reserve for the birds. At a distance, the sun is small. There was no proper Christmas after he died. That triumphant blizzard had brought the city to its knees. I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and more--more strange. But many facts about a life should be left out, they are easily replaced. One sits in a cloven space. Patterns promote an outward likeness, between little white silences. The big trees catch all the moisture from what seems like a dry night. Reflections don't make shade, but shadows are, and do. In order to understand the nature of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions involved--that is, a history. He looked at me and smiled and did not look away, and thus a friendship became erotic. Luck was rid of its clover.

women. women. por um acaso qualquer veio-me à cabeça a frase batida... agora e na hora da nossa morte, santa maria mãe de deus. ladaínha da primavera com os joelhos na tábua, o frio da capela, as contas e o olhar mortiço dos santos. os risinhos das raparigas, algumas de saias, as pernas com manchas vermelhas do frio húmido. rogai por nós pecadores. e nem um homem. não seríamos pecadoras? pecadoras de dez anos. uma morte moral. e os sublinhados foram meus. Language Poetry.




"In looking over the list of questions you gave me in preparation for this interview, I was thinking about the influence of other arts on contemporary writing; I agree with you that the other arts have influenced contemporary writing, but I also think that those qualities in the other arts that are influencing contemporary writing and being influenced by it are coming out of an attention to the culture at large - especially the media: film, television, and advertising. This exchange of influence is affecting pacing, narrative strategies, post-modern juxtapositions, use of the simulacral, play with commodification and anti-commodification, obfuscation as eros, etc. Most of the writers I'm interested in are paying attention to the media; they're interested in the kinds of sentimentalization that is going on in media, the replacement of narration by over-interpreted information or disinformation, with disinformation as the narration of our times."
Entrevista (1995)