“telling a story means tracing your finger through the ashes left by the fires of experience” – alvaro enrigue

On February 5, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Journallings, Reflections5 Comments

I love drawing from the world – almost anything, almost everything – ingesting, sensing, feeling, digesting (transforming, processing) into me to pass it on again.

I love the encounter of humans – frightening, fragile things – the desire and revulsion our fullness brings.

Hope. Dread.

I hope to be loved and wanted.

I dread the opposite.

As if it were about me.

As if there were a thousand suns

And we were one of them

Time doesn’t work that way.

It’s been called an arrow

but it’s likely not –

likely wrinkled, warped and bent –

just like us

giving life to it.

Love is like this.

Like our memories.

I remember clearly what is incorrect –

if anything’s erected so.

I doubt it,

along with me and you and everything else…

just enough to believe.

To live, deeply

On February 1, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry, Traces, Writing1 Comment

There was earth inside them, and

They dug.

– Paul Celan

Immunity (Writing from Everywhere)

On January 7, 2014 By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Reflections, Writing6 Comments

perhaps you will be able to play this WHILE you read the linked entry below (as it was written)

Immunity (Writings from Everywhere)

2 Things in absence of composition

On October 24, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces4 Comments

My maker-wheels or whatever complex machinery sometimes con-fuses to generate documents of creative writing are apparently on the fritz. In lieu of some relatively originary textual flow (idiosyncratic dip into the semiotic waters of the resource of language) I forward along a poem that stands out to me from this weeks’ readings, and a plea that interest-piqued readers immerse themselves in a particular book regarding our co-creation and involvement with the rest of the world and one another…

First, the poem – from Bob Hicok‘s “Elegy Owed” – a fine collection:

and second a plug for a compelling study by Ian Hodder – “Entangled: An Archaeology of the relationships between humans and things”

On Rage, a poem

On October 9, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Poetry6 Comments

Rage

“ …that dog

barking at nothing

because every time he’s barked at nothing,

nothing’s gone wrong and why not keep it that way?”

– Bob Hicok, “One of those things we say…”

Blaze searing eye-corner

fierce rupture

a hazard of blades

we two, entangled –

emotion dug deep and flung far –

architectonic

like the causes of weather

complexity systems

large beyond measure

on any scale

insinuated within

spaces we intimately share

archaic wounds – a butterfly’s wing –

tempest stress to tumultuous effect

(deep dug, far flung)

we two, engangled

emotive amygdalas in action

safe love, a hazard of blades

Found Autobiography

On October 5, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry5 Comments

A country mapped with invisible ink

– Bob Hicok

Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable

nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:

like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue

upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge

of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree

beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,

there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper

one day, a passport the next: like how to escape

my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,

while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,

if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half

the inflection of loss and half a genuflection

to breath: like wondering if this extra half

is a country mapped with invisible ink:

like how windows ask to come along with the going

and preside over the staying, and I look at them

with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:

shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,

the distance back together: boredom cutting me

deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man

in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:

a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed

with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom

of running water: but no body: and I carry

these things to safety that are not the man: the piano

in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers

of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:

and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:

and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,

holding smoke to the mirror interested only

in solid dreams: like it will finally see

what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence

of absence I have tried and tried not to be

**********

“almost as if I’m making her and this poem and my past

up as I go, to help me feel nothing

goes to waste, not even waste.”

-also Bob Hicok

And finally…poems

On October 2, 2013October 1, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry10 Comments

I recognize that I hunger for poetry – periodically I canvas new poetry books and the old on my shelves to be STRUCK – to be wakened – charged – re-membered – into some leaping alive sensibility awareness delight sorrow grief ecstasy – that the vividness and risk of well-made poems incite…

for me, anyway.

Thus, the Bolano. A beginning.

Thus, returning to Nooteboom, a certainty.

Thus, the new arrivals shelf – Wichita Public Library.

and then…today…BOOM.

Bob Hicok, tested favorite, “new arrival,” Elegy Owed

the jump-start.

the activation.

something like recognition and instigation at once.

what poetry does.

and having no idea where to begin to share it with you

to recommend

to commend to you

I’ll just offer the opening poem:

and the closer…

Good-bye

and to tell you that everything in between is every bit as good

and some even better….

Good-bye

Small white church at the edge of my yard.

A bell will ring in a few hours.

People who believe in eternity will sing.

I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch

while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.

I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.

Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

I’m afraid to climb the tree.

That I’ll find bones inside.

That they’ll be mine.

I want to be with my wife forever but not as we are.

She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

the bloodsinging will stop.

Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?

This is where I get self-conscious about language,

words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence

that isn’t a plea.

This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything

is made entirely of light.

This is where my wife and I hold hands.

Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

– Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed

New Arrivals, with poetry and music

On September 27, 2013September 27, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Music, Poetry7 Comments

Submerged in due dates.

Here’s what’s arrived in the center of (my) radar:

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and then, from Roberto Bolano

DON’T WRITE POEMS BUT SENTENCES

Write prayers that you will whisper

before writing those poems

you will think you never wrote

Strange gratuitous occupation To go losing your hair

and your teeth The ancient ways of being educated

Odd complacency (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater

than others) Not wealth or fame or even just

poetry Maybe this is the only way

to avoid fear Settle into fear

like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess Simply

waiting for someone or something in the ruins

and finally,

MY LITERARY CAREER

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also

from Alfaguara,

Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino… All

the publishers… All the readers

All the sales managers…

Under the bridge, while it rains, a golden opportunity

to take a look at myself:

like a snake in the North Pole, but writing.

Writing poetry in the land of idiots.

Writing with my son on my knee.

Writing until night falls

with the thunder of a thousand demons.

The demons who will carry me to hell,

but writing.

all poem like creatures – Roberto Bolano

Excerpts of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

On August 15, 2013 By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Poetry3 Comments

Ideal
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

1 I did not know beforehand what would count for me as a new color. Its beauty is an analysis of things I believe in or experience, but seems to alter events very little. The significance of a bird flying out of grapes in a store relates to the beauty of the color of the translucency of grapes. There is a space among some objects on a table that reminded her of a person, the way the bird reminded her, a sense of the ideal of the space she would be able to see. Beauty can look like this around objects. A plastic bag on a bush, moving slightly, makes an alcove, a glove or mist, holding the hill. Time can look like this. The plane of yourself separates from the plane of spaces between objects, an ordered succession a person apprehends, in order to be reminded.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Red Quiet, Section 3
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Our conversation is a wing below my consciousness, like organization in blowing cloth, eddies of water, its order of light on film with no lens. A higher resonance of story finds its way to higher organization: data swirl into group dreams. Then story surfaces, as if recognized; flies buzzing in your room suddenly translate to “Oh! You’re crying!” So, here I hug the old person, who’s not “light” until I embrace him. My happiness at seeing him, my French suit constitute at the interface of wing and occasion. Postulate whether the friendship is fulfilling. Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake. Postulate the wave nature of wanting him to wait (white space) and the quanta of fractal conflict, point to point, along the outline of a petal, shore from a small boat. Words spoken with force create particles. He calls the location of accidents a morphic field; their recurrence is resonance, as of an archetype with the vibration of a seed. My last thoughts were bitter and helpless. Friends witnessing grief enter your consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.