jonathanmorse
Light flows over
Form under the influence of light
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Marjorie Perloff, 1931-2024
At the MLA hotel in 1972 or ’73, Marjorie Perloff bought me a breakfast. I was living then on what graduate students live on, and that meal was something I very much was in a position to use. Marjorie wasn’t just unhesitant about signing the check, either, or blasé or naive. Her meal arrived for me with a heating of Marjorie force: all enthusiasm, all energetic practical generosity.
Several years…
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Downpassage
What looks down is light
Downseen. What goes darkening
Descends then to light.
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Darkening: the gift
Advancing tooth by tooth, furry jaw by jaw,
Part by part,
Sleek by rough.
Tail following paw
Following claw
Through warmed air
Into air becoming damp:
Mouth moistening,
Air in mouth darkening,
Eyespace gone green to black.
In reclosing mouth
Red redarkening
Toward black.
Toward body asleep.
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History of World War I: two data for the record
Between 1964 and 1969 at the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of Eli Lilly & Co., I worked with a man named Donald Richbourg who claimed to have been a member of the guard detail at the Nürnberg war crime trials. His reminiscences about his clients, as I recall, included these two items.
1. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a big sumbitch.
2. And Julius Streicher used to wash his face in the toilet.
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Rate of cat
Claw by claw, muscle by muscle:
A climb. Then the climb slows,
Then reverses: muscle by muscle, claw by claw.
Lighted in fur, his eyes reflect from above.
Amid the claws are cool pads in warm fur.
The climb stops;
The falling begins. Now light is rising.
His eyes’ light changes with the light’s changing angles.
Then the falling ends.
Soft thud.
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Ionic order
Arnold Genthe, “Anna Duncan dancing.” Arnold Genthe Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/agc/item/2018703918/. Reconstructed.
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Ionic order
Arnold Genthe, “Anna Duncan dancing.” Arnold Genthe Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/agc/item/2018703918/
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The memory of Charles Lamb
In the current issue of Modernism / modernity (September 2023, published early 2024), Christian H. Gelder’s “‘To Measure is All We Know’: William Carlos Williams and the Science of Measurement” offers readings of the persistent word measure in Williams’s oeuvre. Williams’s long-term readers know that that’s an important word for Williams precisely because he never defines it. It’s just out there…
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Power events on an island
Five months ago I published online a little Issuu book about what happened to the history of power in one place, Honolulu, and two times: the 1830s and the nineteen-teens. The first series of events displays Herman Melville plagiarizing the indignation of a German botanist about the tyrannical control of Hawaii’s New England missionaries. The second culminates in an almost successful attempt by…
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