the Atlantic to Superior

"... Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits [...] they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew."

Herman Melville
Moby Dick, 1851

Noepe

"Good words, strong words, words that could have moved mountains, words that were never said. We were all waiting to hear those words but no one ever said them ... hope still waits in the wings ..."

A Silver Mount Zion
Built then Burnt -- Hurrah, Hurrah!
from Born Into Trouble as the Sparks Fly Upward, 2001

" ... facing a dying nation ..."

"... listening for the new-told lies ..."

from The Flesh Failures
Galt MacDermot, James Rado, Gerome Ragni
1968

Noel Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, Peter Yarrow

Minnesota statehood - 1858

"Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile,
Cling, and are borne into the night apart."

-Rupert Chawner Brooke
Mutability
1913

_________________________________________



"I don't belong anywhere. ... It doesn't matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats around the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre ..."

-Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams (Jean Rhys)
Good Morning, Midnight
1939

Deux endroits préférés à Paris …

dream or nightmare?

"... the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today ... my own government" [of the United States of America]

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

-Martin Luther King, Jr
April 4, 1967
Riverside Church, Manhattan

imagined collaboration

music for poetry, poetry for music



Gertrude Stein
February 3, 1874 (Allegheny, Pennsylvania) - July 27, 1946 (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie

(Honfleur, le 17 mai 1866 – Paris, le 1er juillet 1925)

Passiflora caerulea

Κάστωρ καὶ Πολυδεύκης

Kástōr and Polydeúkēs

_________________________________

"They shall have stars at elbow and foot ..."

-Dylan Marlais Thomas.

And death shall have no dominion

1936

... fullest and most ultimate expression ...

"The war is utter damn nonsense--a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting"

____________
Letter from John Dos Passos to Rumsey Marvin
August 23, 1917


****************
"So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression."

Three Soldiers, Part IV
John Dos Passos, 1921

"... take these sunken eyes and learn to see."

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

"Kunst kann nicht modern sein, Kunst ist urewig."

Egon Scheile

12. Juni 1890, Tulln an der Donau -- 31. Oktober 1918, Wien