And with that I complete the second half of a goading (though payment won't be until at least next week), plus provide a detailed account and and review, with observations and bleggal theorizing, on yesterday's mass migration of sites moribund on live blogrolls to moribund on the new blogroll called Moribund (the burgermeister). I cheated - two of the three sub-poems were already written. I am again reminded that I don't do Fuck-It well, my first instinct as always to immediately apply rules to anything supposedly ruleless, the defining and applying of rules more fun than playing without them.
- Was reminded of Jessica Bailiff last night on Mandl's show.
- Zing! The Bayern Munich coach Pep Guardiola had little time to celebrate his team's 3-0 league win at Borussia Dortmund on Saturday, threatening instead to uncover a mole he said has been leaking team details to the media. "It does not matter who it is, heads will roll," Guardiola was quoted in the Bild newspaper as having told his players after the game, angry that tactics had made their way into the press before the game. "I will throw him out. He will not play under me again." The club's chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge confirmed the existence of a mole, saying he should stop or face action from the club. "We will obviously not bring in the NSA [National Security Agency] to find out who it is," Rummenigge told Sky television. "But I advise him to stop doing it or he will have a serious problem not only with Pep Guardiola, but also the entire club."
- How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon.
- Women's justice in New Mexico.
- The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
- I have no idea why this would be, but since moving the moribund to their own locale the blog seems to be loading much faster.
- Szybist interview: I experiment a lot. Sometimes I allow poems to work toward their form; sometimes I begin with form to provide what Lyn Hejinian describes as an intentional ‘field of inquiry’ in which to improvise. For me, to write a poem is to experiment with form, or experiment with how different limitations provoke different kinds of language, different imaginations.
- Requiem for a wood sprite.
- Chrostowska? Good thing I have access to a university library.
- Happy Birthday, Prunella! Her latest playlist has the guy with whom she shares a birthday. I confess I don't know as much about Mark Lanegan's music as I should, and who the hell does birthdays on blog anyway?
THE TROUBADOURS ETC
Mary Szybist
Just for this evening, let's not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We've followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
lounging sheep, telephone wires,
yellowing flowering shrubs.
Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.
When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.
And when we stop we'll follow—what?
Our hearts?
The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
quietly to myself in my blue dress,
a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
though cloudless.
At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
even as it swells—
Just for this evening, won't you put me before you
until I'm far enough away you can
believe in me?
Then try, try to come closer—
my wonderful and less than.
