My brother Elric is 53 today, Happy Birthday! He reads occasionally, not as often as he once did before we fell out over Chelsea Manning but I'm told more often than I thought.
Howard Nemerov was lucky enough to be born on February 29th, since March 1 belongs to Chopin and Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell, I give today to Nemerov, born 23.5 years ago if you only count February 29ths.
GYROSCOPE
This admirable gadget, when it is
Wound on a string and spun with steady force,
Maintains its balance on most any smooth
Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes.
It is whirled not on a constant course, but still
Stands in unshivering integrity
For quite some time, meaning nothing perhaps
But being something agreeable to watch,
A silver nearly silence gleaning a still-
ness out of speed, composing unity
From spin, so that its hollow spaces seem
Solids of light, until it wobbles and
Begins to whine, and then with an odd lunge
Eccentric and reckless, it skids away
And drops dead into its own skeleton.
- I'll be honest, with someone who I've posted as often as Nemerov I don't go back to make sure I'm not repeating posting poems. I'm certain I'm repeating poems. Click the tag for more, you'll probably see these but many others too.
- I've probably done that Dismemberment Plan gag before too.
- I discovered that if I put gifs in the blog header they worked, they never had before. Unfortunately, none of the gifs I have is large enough to fill the header's dimension. I put the UFO Ride into the header, it was the size it is as background now. I thought.... so. Not permanent (probably), gifs is general not just this one in particular, though now and then and for today. I don't think it's the cause of today's slow loading (I think it's the statcounter widget and/or one of the youtubes and/or one or more of the sites on the blogrolls has broken its feed); I took the gif down and the load was just as slow.
- And the statcounter widget's skeeviness has ceased, at least temporarily, and moving the youtube-heavy George posts off the front page seems to have stopped the slow-load issue.
- UPDATE! GIF down. Blooger skeevy.
- UPDATE! Here's the weird. Blog is down in my house - and any place where internet is via Comcast because eNom, who provides my domain name, has crashed with Comcast. So GIF will be back. Or not.
- Which 90s Indie Band are you? I got Neutral Milk Hotel which is funny cause if I've nothing personal against any member of Neutral Milk Hotel I nonetheless really dislike the music, I guarantee you can search the ten years of this shitty blog, you won't find any Neutral Milk Hotel anywhere.
- Rilke, for those of you who do, his 5th Duino.
- Storm Light from Ocean View.
- ROBERTSON DAVIES!
- Silliman's always generous litlinks.
- Sunn O)))!
- Prunella's latest playlist.
- UPDATE! Richard just told me Swans are playing Black Cat this May 14th. I might be picking up Planet from college then but just bought a ticket. Hurry, buy yours soon! If it's announced that St Vincent is on the tour (she's gonna be on the new album) it will sell out as soon as news hits.
- I was supposed to see Swans w/Mr Alarum last year, couldn't make it, I forget now why, been kicking myself ever since. This guarantees that I'll be in Ohio this May 14th.
- Fell asleep listening to/woke up with The Necks in my head, you can hear more by clicking on that tag.
WRITING
Howard Nemerov
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger’s to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
THE MURDER OF WILLIAM REMINGTON
Howard Nemerov
It is true, that even in the best-run state
Howard Nemerov
It is true, that even in the best-run state
Such things will happen; it is true,
What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate
Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue
But by the smoke, and not for thought alone
It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.
And yet there is the horror of the fact,
Though we knew not the man. To die in jail,
To be beaten to death, to know the act
Of personal fury before the eyes can fail
And the man die against the cold last wall
Of the lonely world—and neither is that all:
There is the terror too of each man’s thought,
That knows not, but must quietly suspect
His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught
To take an attitude merely correct;
Being frightened of his own cold image in
The glass of government, and his own sin,
Frightened lest senate house and prison wall
Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high
Look faintly smiling down and seem to call
A crime the welcome chance of liberty,
And any man an outlaw who aggrieves
The patriotism of a pair of thieves.
