October 2011
25 posts
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“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”
– Ken Kesey, in The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test (1968)
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“—AND YET THIS GREAT WINK OF ETERNITY…”
– Hart Crane, Voyages II
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A Proem
Woooooosh. The wind washes through the trees with deep heavy sighs that sound like the heaving Pacific. I lick my lips and imagine I taste salt and pine and rain all at the same time. The wind laps at my skin with a warm wet tongue and I’m a newborn calf, eyes milky from the womb, newly and briefly blind. Present but still closed to all the beauty and horror of the world. Licked clean by the...
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NABOKOV ON FAME
INTERVIEWER
Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?
NABOKOV
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
—From The Paris Review (No. 41, 1967)
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Trout
I do my best
to keep pointlessness
at bay. But here,
wet above my
knees, I let it fly.
Here, hot and cold,
fingers thick with
thinking, I try to
tie the fly and look
for the net, loosening
the philosophical
knot of why I came
here today, not yet
knowing whether
I’ll free or fry
the rainbows
and browns once
they’re mine.
—Kathryn Starbuck
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“The conscience of my elusive race gives not a fig for me, baby. But I endure,...”
– Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
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