Hell is oneself. Or, if you like, Hell is other people. Either way, Hell’s Modernist vanguard—let’s say Beckett, Sartre, and Eliot—moiled in darkness long enough to recover the bad news and bring it to daylight…
I am very grateful for your unremitting loyalty to my troublesome self and interminable composition which is at last to be offered to a mystified world…
…I think it speaks so well to our moment, because we are so inundated with different types of culture, and this idea that we should be hierarchically stacking them or appropriately engaging with them at certain moments or not—I think that’s over, that’s passé, and John’s work is much more fluid, and then you realize all the experimental and progressive work in poetry is that way, too…
But how can I forget that harrowing Thanksgiving in Houston, Texas two years ago, my Uncle Monk, the successful lawyer, stumbling up to me before Thanksgiving dinner, begging conspiratorially, breath reeking of vodka, “Where can I get some blow?”
It is plainly suggested that Elves do ‘sleep’, but not in our mode, having a different relation to what we call ‘dreaming’…
boomgloomerang, boomgloomerang, boomboomcheroo, / gloom never skips, has no blood and no shoes…
“Gloomerang” is as playful a poem about despair as you are likely to read: compulsively playful, in a way that might be the cure and might be the cause. It takes its start from the crossing of Bumerang, German (or is it Australian?) for boomerang, and Kummer, for sorrow…
We are sitting in a brown vapour, hearing fog signals from time to time, while your moon, I suppose, is stuck among the apple trees and Emphie, having grown very weatherwise, foretells a fine day.
The following letter was written to Victor Hugo by his mistress Juliette Drouet. The two began their affair in 1833 after the production of Hugo’s play, Lucrezia Borgia, in which Drouet played the lead role of the murderous Princesse Négroni. … Continued
But victory did not come and neither did relief. I suppose the obsession to do oneself that old harm with all its aftereffects and menaces proved stronger, more powerful…
