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“The night we met was a bit of a wash” Chris Nealon’s terrific “Bro Code,” part of a selection of pieces “In Memoriam J. H. Prynne” in the new Blackfold Manifold: “It’s like your poems got denser and denser until they came out the other end and became a party game, hilarious sonic waterslides“

Blackbox Manifold - ChrisNealonJHPBM36Bro Code Well ... maybe you were right It is a weird time to feel like all men are brothers But I remain committed to my sentiment And to say it’s muddied by eros explains nothing at all S...sites.google.com

Somewhere William Gass (b. 30 July 1924) says “and” is a “sunderer”: any conjunct a wedge keeping distinct the objects it attempts to join. William Gass, painted (with no ands, ifs, or buts) by Philip Guston:

Newish work in the latest Denver Quarterly (v.60 no.3), thanks to Jane Huffman, Ian Cappelli, et al. Here’s the opening three entries (of thirty-one) out of “Notes Written in October.” Part of a manuscript called “Notes for General Circulation.”

Lisa Robertson, out of Riverwork, part of a lovely paean to dust (“I am a dust artist . . . displacing cosmic matter temporarily from its solid support to make a negative image of time.”) A way of talking about quotation, circulation, infinite reuse, and how language is ever-borrowed, ever-impure.

The late Cees Nooteboom, out of the Laura Watkinson-translated _533 Days_ (2021), talking about Mallarmé’s search for la poésie pure—“a poetry that would express the absolute . . . a poetry stripped of all that was superfluous”—rather in the way, in painting, of “Malevich or Mondrian”:

Walter Benjamin (b. 15 July 1892), who quoted “wholly, meanderingly, thumb-through-ably”: “To quote a text means to interrupt its context.” And: “The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.”

Henry David Thoreau (b. 12 July 1817), who noted somewhat famously that “life is frittered away by detail,” out of _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ (1849):

Marvelous. _The carving of insects_ was a common phrase for mediocre writing. . . . When the singer Ch’in Ch’ing sang, the clouds stopped moving so that they could listen.

Sudden involuntary memory of thinking (ca. 1965, aetat. 11) “I Got You Babe” was sung by Sonny and the Chairs.

Any little win against the maleficent household deities (they are all maleficent) must needs warrant a notice. Pulled the bathroom sink P-trap, snaked some horrifying sludge out of it and the drain pipe, cleaned up, reassembled. As Rene Daumal liked to say: “Cent cons m’enterrent sans commentaires.”

David Shapiro, talking about Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), in an interview with Yasmine Shamma. Out of Conversations with New York School Poets (2025), a book of some few terrific moments notwithstanding the clumsiness of its premises and executions:

At the approach, teeth bared, of the semiquincentennial in this land of rampant berserker-y, I wonder at the impossibility of reading a thing I wrote “for” the bicentennial now fifty years ago. Neiges d’antan and all that. Out of Rubbing Torsos (1979).

Out of an interview with John Godfrey, in Yasmine Shamma’s _Conversations with New York School Poets_ (2025), two debatable things to ponder: New York School style and the individual word, and the fastidious Mr. Ashbery:

Out of Eliot Weinberger’s 2015 talk “Ancestors” (concluding: “Literature has traditionally been a way to hear the dead speak, to learn of what they’ve seen, to hear their stories. . . . The ancestors you choose will determine the writer you become.”), a gentle rebuke of (much of) American poetry: