Q:

A:


My grandmother told me a story. When she was a young woman, and bombs were dropping themselves on Europe, food was scarce in Arnem, the Netherlands. The bitter winter had frozen the ground, so that even a shovel couldn’t break the surface of the earth. On a particularly cold morning, a German plane was shot down, and crashed into a field filled with potatoes. The women of Arnem, my grandmother included, ran into the field, newly thawed by the burning wreckage of the plane, and gathered potatoes in the half-light of the evening. Not having shovels, they used sticks and other tools to dig the potatoes out of the earth. Some women used their hands, not having anything more effective at their disposal. This story is true. It is also true that my grandmother is now dead, a part of the story that she would find herself unable to relate. All stories exclude someone from their center.

A:


A talking ape, fluttering its fingers against the bars of the cage.

A:


No one is in the middle.

A:


I don’t remember much about it, though. I remember your hands. Your hands on the wheel, following the lead of my words. I remember your hands. Your hands at your side, emptied. I remember your hands on the table, your hands on the ground. My own hands were damp, and slipped easily into the loose topsoil.

from Thomas the Obscure, by Maurice Blanchot

He nevertheless decided to turn his back to the sea and entered a small woods where he lay down after taking a few steps. The day was about to end; scarcely any light remained, but it was still possible to see certain details of the landscape fairly clearly, in particular the hill which limited the horizon and which was glowing, unconcerned and free. What was disturbing to Thomas was the fact that he was lying there in the grass with the desire to remain there for a long time, although this position was forbidden to him. As night was falling he tried to get up, and, pushing against the ground with both hands, got one knee under him while the other leg dangled; then he made a sudden lurch and succeeded in placing himself entirely erect. So he was standing.

green, yellow, magenta, white

found poem VI

I was at the country side 

and suddenly 

saw Massimo Kamscin 

putting hand up

till elbow. 

Have you ever seen some ...

something ... 

like this?

Just take a close look at that picture:

Tell me please, 

if you want to follow me, 

next time I travel outside the town.

both ii

both

a warning

I am only
able to give you
this piece of bread
right now, but

be warned

that I have thought
of all of the thoughts
that keep
rising from this
crater at
our right
hand.

blue dome

Anselm Kiefer, Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, 1970, watercolor, gouache, and graphite pencil on joined paper, 15 3/4" x 18 7/8". Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, 1995.

green moment

a victory for art

Esthetics have devolved into rare types of stupidity. Each kind of stupidity may be broken down into categories such as bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures. All these categories and many others all petrify into a vast banality called the art world which is no world. A nice negativism seems to be spawning. A sweet nihilism is everywhere. Immobility and inertia are what many of the most gifted artists prefer. Vacant at the center, dull at the edge, a few artists are on the true path of stultification. Muddleheaded logic is taking the place of clearheaded illogic, much to nobody's surprise.

-Robert Smithson, 

ON THE OCCASION OF THE ART AND TECHNOLOGY SHOW AT THE ARMORY

types, like blooms

cave song poem
desert, or sand, poem
fur poem
sub, hematoma poem
glottal poem
hand poem
fern spore poem
second lung poem

wind(ow)

from "sea surface full of clouds" by Wallace Stevens

   IV

In that November off Tehuantepec
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made one think of musky chocolate
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C’était ma foi, la nonchalance divine.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would—But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

two tiers

mir v