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loneberry · 6 days
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Boston/Cambridge MA alert! Come to this reading at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square.
Tongo Eisen-Martin and Jackie Wang with an introduction by Keith Jones
April 18, 2024
7:00 PM
In-person sign up: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/x8wgjph/lp/ccaaa417-6464-433b-b8d6-1f87864af42f
Virtual sign up: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/w7ddwrs/lp/fc19c651-bb7e-47f9-a2f2-b1e6a5d13f47
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loneberry · 9 days
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A year and three days ago. I am in Portland again, still thinking about the last words of dying people. In all of the fragments above there is a dissolution into infinity (hundreds of ships, scattering butterflies, the infinity of lemonade). It’s like the dying person is experiencing themselves breaking up into little bits—the bounded days fraying as we are finally wrecked by the centrifugal force of time.
I sit beneath the same blossoming cherry tree I sat beneath a year ago, reading poetry. Look up at the bees, the crows are sent aflight as the loud motorcycle cruises down the adjacent street. I could spend my whole life supine on the earth, looking skyward as the petals fall like unseasonable snow, thinking my morbid thoughts. Always, I see a premonition of my death. I am burning up like an astronaut entering the atmosphere—the last blazing light. Those are my memories, projected in the mind one last time—I see the light streaming through the blooming dogwood on a sunny day. Why flowers? Like Kafka and his preternatural concern for what is fragile, the cut peony of his deathbed. There was beauty and disappointment in equal measure, all dissolving into the neutrality of pre-birth. That’s what it’s like. To be matter without sentience. There is no genius like the genius of the world, I think, contemplating the intricacy of trees. Nothing I could say will even come close to that genius.
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After I finished making a midterm exam, Molly and I went to a secret Japanese tea house. It appears on no map, has no hours, no sign. It is as though it exists, somehow, outside this world. When you enter, you give your phone to the owner to lock in a box for the duration of your visit.
We stayed for nearly 6 hours—sat reading poems, chatting with the eccentric owner about Sufism and the ocean and his peculiar flower arrangements consisting of a mix of living and dead plant matter.
How can I describe it, the strange sensation of being alive, late at night in those dim lights, surrounded by beauty. I got up to look at the wares, inhaled the hinoki essential oil—Max Richter was playing as I stared at blank notecards and imagined writing someone a heartfelt note, writing bravely, from that bewitched and emotionally authentic space I was in. I felt a sudden pang. It was the moment opening, with all its counterfactuals, what could have been, what will never be—how deeply I could feel, in that instant, the texture of my grief.
When I’m in the hustle and bustle of my busy and now quite ordinary life, I think, if only I could really hear the voice that says,
“Jackie, it was not for this that you were created.”
Then I would give away all my things and spend my days in prayer.
Susan Howe writes that for Sarah Edwards, “all works of God are a kind of language or voice to instruct us in things pertaining to calling and confusion.”
“...each soul comes upon the call of God in his word. I read words but don’t hear God in them.”
Did I pray, how long in supplication, with my inner eye fixed on that phantom, the phantom with her eyes stitched shut, limbs covered in oak moss. A dream of the opening of the eyes, the inert limbs now lithe and moving toward you. Ordinary objects and sounds are suddenly strange. That’s when the phantom slips through, when I hear the birds singing in a tree...
The blooming moment. Retrospectively, I am convinced that its condition of possibility was the confiscation of my phone, that it is only when we are unplugged that we can sense these holy emanations.
How calm we were, leafing through the book of Japanese death poems (jisei) in the tea house. What will be the last words I write before dying? For all I know, it could be this, or this. I remembered the dying words of George Mackay Brown: “I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of the harbour.” I remember the fragments Kafka wrote while dying, “lemonade everything was infinite,” his concern for the peony, the improvised performance—the incantation—I did at the Zinc Bar in 2015 using Kafka’s dying words, how J wept in the audience, then wrote me about the snow:
I am the guy, by the way, who said hi on the street, in the snow, after your reading. … I did indeed cry after your Kafka-Cixous incantation, partly because that phrase has been magic to me my whole life. I read Cixous' novel by that name when I studied with her and Derrida in my twenties... Her seminars were amazing. One day, funnily enough, she gave a seminar on snow in Proust, simply because snow was on the ground in Paris. For all sorts of reasons your whole reading shook and tenderised me deeply. I suppose, with the snow through the tinted glass outside, it will forever be, my imagination of what you read will forever be blanche niege texte.
(standing on the corner in manhattan with that powdery snow i was looking at the flowers when you walked past actually, turned, swivelled, i had needed to get out of the bar because the reading had touched me so much . . . i then went and wandered in the snow for an hour, till i happened on a subway, and back to my friend's in brooklyn . . . i have been thinking more today about how effective your reading was to me. it sort of made me feel i could only read poetry from now on if i was embodied, since what convinced in your reading beyond the obvious was the adjustments to us, the audience, the interruptions, the ability to break off, and then the actual concentration because of the embodiments . . . at most poetry readings i am constantly thinking 'i am at a poetry reading' and can't really get beyond the poem-as-poem-at-reading. when you read i was suddenly completely focused. the bodily resonation was right, a recuperation of grace, so i could listen. like before the internet or something. it returned me all the way to early cixous and feminine writing and what that could still mean, a writing beyond master-works and over-sociality of tact, agua viva, what korine might call 'mistakist' heaven. it was my first time in new york. my last night. stop. for now. cut the flowers.)
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loneberry · 10 days
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Landscape in the Mist (1988) by Theo Angelopoulos
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loneberry · 12 days
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Where’s Wang?
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loneberry · 12 days
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Register here for my Zoom event with Christopher Soto on Monday 💜
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loneberry · 14 days
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Landscape in the Mist (1988) by Theo Angelopoulos
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loneberry · 19 days
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4 events in 4 days on two coasts. I’ve got rough versions of my Mandel lectures but they still need a lot of work.
After next week I’m gonna just watch films with my beau and look at some trees
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loneberry · 22 days
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Last night’s dream is the clearest signal yet—I want comfort from God. I want to give birth to the grief baby. To be held as the pain is exorcise as an embryonic demon, a lump of bloody dead flesh that is expelled from my convulsing body. Grief baby? Dr Cramer asks about the catharsis. A release of sadness? Yes, something like a release of sadness. God can’t give it to me, and even if he could, I wouldn’t want it from him. If he were to break his silence I would run, unable to be close to any real presence. Only in my head can I receive the succor I yearn for, to be pressed, firmly, in all the places where the pain is stored, to be kneaded, like dough. It all came out of me in one gasping release. Once I got a taste of that comfort I could not stop searching for it.
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loneberry · 24 days
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That time I had a vision of the ocean saying, I will have the last laugh.
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loneberry · 26 days
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--Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
Re-read this wonderful little book. My copy is in my office in LA, but I was able to find a PDF online. It really is such a gem.
All is grace. Pray, let me be a humble servant of my craft.
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loneberry · 26 days
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Maborosi, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda (1995)
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--Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
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loneberry · 28 days
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Reading at Berkeley in the Holloway Poetry Series on March 14. See you in the Bay <3
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loneberry · 29 days
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March 11-13: I will be delivering the Mandel Lectures at Brandeis University. The three oceanic-themed lectures will focus on political economy, poetry, and mysticism (yeah, I'm hitting all my fancies here). The lectures will eventually be published as a book. More info here:
https://www.brandeis.edu/mandel-center-humanities/mandel-lectures.html
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loneberry · 30 days
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--Ahmad Ghazali, Sawāneḥ (1114)
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loneberry · 30 days
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It's official--I found a publisher for my unpublishable book.
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loneberry · 1 month
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Dec 18
Imagine my horror when I got on the 6.5 hour train from Prague to Krakow and realized I didn’t have a seat. Everyone without seat reservations had to stand in a cramped space by the doors. There was a kind man wearing a Victory to Ukraine hoodie. I asked him, "Are you Ukrainian?" "Yes." His name was Yuri. He actually had a seat, but when he went to go sit in it there was a little girl in the seat, and he couldn’t bear to ask her to get up. “I have a 4 year-old daughter,” he said. It was his first trip away from her. He was taking the train home to Kyiv after playing in a professional poker tournament. I spoke with him the whole train ride, about the war (“we are not optimistic now”) and about trivial things (“I got hooked on playing chess on my phone while caring for my daughter, as a way to relax”). He spoke about the places he wants to visit but added, “I might be called to the front any day now” (he is 36). Every time he travels, with special permission from the government, he says people tell him not to go back home. “Stay here. You won’t be conscripted.” But as a matter of principle he has chosen to stay in Ukraine. He no longer talks to his cousin in Russia. He says that when Ukrainians talk to family members in Russia, those living in Russia claim that the war is not happening.
We talked about geopolitical instability, the possibility of WWIII. Taiwan came up. I said I wanted to go with my father to Taiwan before it’s too late. He said, Go. And added that the Ukrainians identify with the situation of the Taiwanese, of living in the shadow of a bigger and more powerful neighbor who believes they have a claim to your territory.
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Today is the 2-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is so much to say about the current state of the war but I will spare you my lay analysis. It makes me sad.
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loneberry · 1 month
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The streetlight throbbing
like Morse code…
Who is speaking to me through the light?
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