It rhymes and does not confirm

for Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Off the brown brink."

Over smog colored
embankments,

the same split
wings
aflutter,

the exhaustive, glancing
perusal.

It flashes
but doesn't gather.

It rhymes and does not
confirm.

Rae Armantrout, "Day"

Still alive inside the sentence

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. 

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

Etymology gone m/bad

Les dents, la bouche

Les dents la bouchent

L’aidant la bouche

L’aide en la bouche

Laides en la bouche

Laid en la bouche

Lait dans la bouche

L’est dam le à bouche

Les dents-là bouche 

Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1923)

The poem is you

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.

Look at it talking to you. You look out a window

Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.

You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.

What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,

Bringing a system of them into play. Play?

Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,

As in the division of grace these long August days

Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know

It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only

To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there

Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem

Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"

The garden flew round with the angel,

The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson's Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
But that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.

Wallace Stevens, "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating"

Photo: Maia Flore

Pelo que me toca, responderei também, e mostrarei o que sei, pois estou cheio de palavras, e o espírito que está dentro de mim oprime-me.

O meu peito é como o vinho arrolhado, como vinho pronto a rebentar em odres novos.

Livro de Job, 32:17 – 19

Poetry may or may not work out its own salvation in a man [or in a woman], but it comes only to those in dire imaginative need of it, though it may come then as a terror.

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence

This otherness, this

“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at

In the mirror, though no one can say

How it came to be this way. A ship

Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.

John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

Foto: Maia Flore

Essa linguagem é de marinheiro, mas tu não és marinheiro,
Se tenho a linguagem é como se o fosse.

José Saramago, O conto da ilha desconhecida

Onde os reclames do coração se cruzam




Vincenzo Balocchi

 

A pele por fulgurantes
instantes muitas vezes abre-se até onde
seria impensável que exercesse
com tão grande rigor o seu domínio.

Não temos então dela senão rápidas
visões, onde os reclames
do coração se cruzam, solitários
e agrestes, reflectidos

por trás nos ossos empedrados.
Em certas posições vêem-se as cordas
do nosso espírito esticadas num terraço.

A roupa dói-nos porque, embora
nos cubra a pele, é dentro
do espírito que estão os tecidos amarrados.

Luís Miguel Nava, “Paisagem Citadina” 

O eco de mil sinos de prata
emudece
ante o labor da aranha


O tempo emudece
na cegueira do ar
na sua geografia nula

Que queres de mim
matéria insensível?

Nas coisas conhecidas
o verbo ser
emudece

Ana Hatherly, “O eco de mil sinos de prata”

Foto

A Flor da Tinta é Negra

…

A flor da tinta é negra

Mas nos dedos dele, adquire muitas formas

Uma abelha… uma palmeira… uma rapariga a cavalo

Um planeta regressando de um tempo longínquo

Uma bola de fogo acariciando os que entre nós são áridos e estéreis

Transformando a terra em chamas e em estacas de fumo

…

Quando abri o tinteiro

E fitei a tinta

Encontrei um génio adormecido lá dentro

Eu estava nervoso, a tinta manchou-me a ponta dos dedos

Tracei uma linha, depois outra

Tornaram-se ruas

E mais uma e outra linha

E chegaram os invasores

Um grupo de pobres veio defender-nos

O meu coração embriagado de orgulho e felicidade

Gaguejei um pouco

Divaguei um pouco

Ajudaram-me ou mataram-me os alfabetos

Queimaram-me a boca com balas

A tinta percorreu-me todas as veias

E o meu sangue correu nas veias da imprensa.

Abdel Karim Sabawi (poeta e jornalista Palestiniano)

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.

R. Barthes, Lover's Discourse (1978)

Una habitación sin tímpano

Lo que origina el sitio

de las palabras, inventa

desunión dentro – en cualquier

cerebro

orando gracias a los puñados de frases.

Hay una habitación sin tímpano,

interior a los órganos

contra la voz.

No nos interesa otro nombre

sino esta playa final.

J.M. Antolín, Ojo Vivo