προγραφές

'The idea of innocence faces two ways. By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy, But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant. The issue is not between innocence and knowledge (or between the natural and the cultural) but between a total approach to art which attempts to relate it to every aspect of experience and the esoteric approach of a few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline. (In decline, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state.) The real question is: to whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?'

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, publisher: Penguin

'Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-as an anthology of images.'

Susan Sontag, On Photograph, publisher: Penguin

'There is no Greek Madonna ; the goddesses are always childless. The actions selected are those which would be without significance, except in a divine person-binding on a sandal or preparing foe the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is most often represented as just finished so that eager expectancy is excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the Python, or the Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand.'

'Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.'

'Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion-that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’s sake.'

Walter Pater, The Renaissance, publisher: Macmillan and Co.

ARRIVAL

Bitter roseblood from dead grapes,
Miniature rivets, flowing on cracked lips.
Old men fighting death in secret corners,
Time rushing wildly through terrified streets.

Odors of laughter reach the nostrils,
Pure poetry from the mouths of children,
Waves of dark flames batter the dawn.
The crawling day arrives, on skinned
Knees.

* * *

SMALL MEMORIAM FOR MYSELF

Beyond the reach of scorn, lust is freed of its vulgar face.
No more blanch of terror at reality's threat of sadness.
No blend of grief can cause the death of laughter now.

In rememberance of certain lights I have seen go out,
I have visualized pathetic rituals and noisy requiems,
Composed of metaphysical designs of want and care.

Bob Kaufman, The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

LOST WINDOW

Tall strips of carrion moonlight.
Sparing only stars.
Giant bees gliding along the sidewalks,
Lonely insects, stinrging each other.
Unknowing victims, mounting feathery scaffolds.
Lines of tired aprons dancing mobile-like
Across lit stages of air.
Minutepieces of death, flinging themselves
Across crowded intersections.
Muted sobbing of a hidden child,
Filters over the sill
Of a secret window, hidden
In the dark corner
Of evening.

* * *

BELIEVE, BELIEVE

Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society's garments.

Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.

Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time.

Bob Kaufman, Cranial Guitar ('Golden Sardine'), publisher: Coffe House Press

'So when I came to New York I was prepared then to be an intellectual. You know what I’m saying, oh, now I know things. But the only thing you don’t know is what you'll have to face. You don’t know the nature of the struggle that you have to get it. So I arrived and I was standing in San Juan one afternoon crying because I was reading a poem in the New Yorker and I said, I can never write a poem like that-about bird baths, trips to Connecticut, the 508 out of New York to Connecticut, I could never write like that. So I said, there must be something I can do with my life. I know what, I can write my own poetry. I can write it as it comes out of me, as messed up as that is, as broke down, as urbanly challenged, as ethnically squashed, that will be my poetry. And I will be so arrogant as to claim it and to say, this is my poetry, right here.'

Amiri Baraka, 'Pulling it down or The good manners of vampires', from the anthology Beats at Naropa, publisher: Coffee House Press

A HAIKU

The little worm
lowers itself frrom the roof
By a self shat thread

Jack Kerouac, Heaven & Other Poems, publisher: Grey Fox Press