The deadline for the 2008 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a $2,500 grant given to a woman writer of 32 years or younger, is this Thursday, May 15. For more information, click here. - - - - |
Das Kissenbuch.BY JOSHUA CLOVER
Just like they used to read biographies of Napoleon; d'you think it'll work? I totally accept the idea that you need some kind of strategy or things Will go from bad to worse, ending with swigging Coca-Cola in bed and The days starting to slip away with no one under yr thumb. Poets, I urge you to title yr books of the future The Principal, or The Capital, So poetry shelves in Berlin will be filled with books called Das Kapital. Do not call it My Struggle; this will lead to mishaps as all lines lead to Zoo Station. Die Kunst des Krieges, that wd be a title worthy of a poet! Soon the gentlemen of business will be seen reading Hesiod, Works And Days, concerning the two forms of strife: "one fosters evil war and Battle, being cruel," but the other stirs up envy, greed, and such things As lead to labor, "and this Strife is wholesome for men." Y'know, things One cd use. One evening some years later it was raining in the capital Of Europe where scavenged shopping carts passed for window grates and We walked beside the artificial lake, considering the immortal Lao Tzu, Dead a long time; late in the Spring and Autumn Period he found work As an archivist in the Imperial Library, and was apparently a bit of a poet, Unlike Sun (no relation), a general. One makes one's way as a poet Amid libraries and bookstores though "the way is deeply hidden in all things" According to Lao, and the businessmen are seeking it en route from work, Riding the subway adrift in the grim luxuries of text here in one capital Of the book. Words are stretched over reality's breadth like gold tissue, Who said that? There's another way to look at it, according to Arbeiten und Tage, on the depressing side of the sublime: "All your talk will be in vain, and Your word-play unprofitable." Zat a threat or a promise? He was less a poet Than a motivational speaker, Hesiod, less flowers of wisdom than the kudzu Of endless increase. An object shd be replaced swiftly by a like thing Once the first is exhausted or the whole primitive accumulation of capital Risks rack and ruin—oh great, just like 1992, everybody out of work, Anarchist squats, that's yr plan for a world system? The wave of work Keeps going like a sentence keeps going, gathering material as it goes, and One lives among this jetsam, is of the jetsam, is quizzical at being a capital I at this late date, when I lived among the businessmen and the poets And nobody read past the second of six books On The Nature of Things, We floated between the horizons of the general and the librarian, Sun Tzu And Lao Tzu, and this was not such a terrible place to be, in the capital Of the XXIst century, reading at work. The poet Sei Shonagon placed paradise And the course of a boat on a list, "Things That Are Near Though Distant."
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