a forest of things

Patricia Lockwood tries to lock the Internet in her mind for an hour.

Paul Celan (tr. Michael Hamburger)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Deer Hirsch. 1995.

Wolfgang Tillmans, End of Broadcast. 2014.

Do Ho Suh, Who Am We? 2000. Ink on wallpaper.

Astronauts as humans, humans as astronauts, in this brief interview with poet Catherine Barnett.

Rediscovered rereading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

Terence Hayes from poet portrait series by B. A. Van Sise up on BuzzFeed.

The Music from the Balconies, Ed Ruscha, 1984

Dear Ol' Dirty Bastard: I too like it raw, I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is Never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandanna is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandanna. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what is truly real though it may be hidden by the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbagemen drift along the predawn avenues, a sloppy slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milquetoast is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse. Bakku-shan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is Never mistake what it looks like for what it is else you end up like that Negro Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don't you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother Bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king. And that's okay. No one will tell you you are the king. No one really wants a king anyway.

The first thing I saw in the morning Was a huge golden bee ploughing His burly right shoulder into the belly Of a sleek yellow pear Low on a bough. Before he could find that sudden black honey That squirms around in there Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more. The pear fell to the ground, With the bee still half alive inside its body. He would have died if I hadn’t knelt down And sliced the pear gently A little more open. The bee shuddered, and returned. Maybe I should have left him alone there, Drowning in his own delight. The best days are the first To flee, sang the lovely Musician born in this town So like my own. I let the bee go Among the gasworks at the edge of Mantua.

On Writing a Collection of poems