oh the horror
we talk about blocks about anxiety i check the
Iowa Writer’s Workshop site $50,000+ annually
i think i can get in i don’t believe in writer’s block
+i can spin words into gold (gold jerry gold!)
Rilke gestated the duino elegies for 10 years
so what was he doing instead of dragging words
dark+bloody from his loins? smoking pot drinking gin
reading the duinos u can see that he needed a
decade to cram angels+archangels by the tens
of thousands onto the head of a pin
so did he believe the voices up in castle duino? (dead with final poem at 49)
you’re lazy
you’re bored
you have nothing to say
you’re washed up +ugly
hell no in those ten years Rilke stoked his immortality but for me
sitting Kurtz-like on the river of brokendreams the wordcemetery
beckons a bog poet bogwoman and the word feckless appears
in the gator’s mouth along with poet’s black toes
__
..could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt
how big, how confoundedly big, was the thing that couldn’t talk,
and perhaps was deaf as well. I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there..
(Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1902)
Fall 2020
..but, oh those nights- those nights when the infinite wind eats at our faces..
and the nosing beasts scent how insecurely we’re housed in this signposted World..
do you still not know it? (Rilke First Elegy 1912)
