À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
That’s Chico up there, my hometown, showing one of its best faces in a photograph by Youngna Park that’s for sale at 20×200 this week.
That’s Chico up there, my hometown, showing one of its best faces in a photograph by Youngna Park that’s for sale at 20×200 this week.
They will not save themselves if, coming as they have from the street and not out of the museums, they do not have the courage to speak words that can go back into the street again. — Eugenio Montale
Hommage à Susan Howe
New Orleans Streets Department
11/23/09
Road sign, unhinged
New Orleans, LA

In the photo (borrowed from Illuminated Meat): Kenny Goldsmith, Rod Smith, and someone’s edition of Day.

“Miss Poem” of Hamra Street, in addition to “Jardin des poetes,” a plant nursery on the highway outside Byblos, and “Poeme,” a lingerie store near the bottom of the Chouf mountains, testify to the worldwide relevance of peignoirs, greenery, and dreaming women (“over the seas, to silent Palestine”) to the work that poetry does (that is, if it is work, and not some kind of, well, cheesecake). I want to say something like, well, rage and crisis are not the end-all of poetry, it’s the rêve, is it not?
And then I read about women’s ritha’ (elegy for fallen kinsmen) in pre-Islamic poetry, and how the cliches of the bereaved are transcended only in the part of the elegy designated the tahrid, or call to vengeance. That is, by Western standards of originality in poetry, the women really hit it when inspired not by grief but by blood-lust.
One can’t help thinking of rage, too, while looking on perhaps the oldest text we have written in the Phoenician alphabet—the mother of all linear alphabets.
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