Free Xpression

All that we see could also be otherwise
All that we can describe could also be otherwise
The thing seen is the thing seen together with the whole space
—Myung Mi Kim, Commons

 

The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act … I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance. —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

PHOTOS. This collection, May-October 2024, of random and evolving artworks painted on, painted over, painted again, both sides of a small free-standing FREEWALL placed two years ago in a Eugene city park south of the Riverwalk and east of the I-105 bridge. LINK for a previous post, May 7 2024: Conspiracy of Visibilities

 

CODA
The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the world's contents to their dissolution into motions and relations.
—Myung Mi Kim, Excerpt from Commons (2004). “Avant-garde” poet and professor of creative writing, Myung Mi Kim, born in Seoul, Korea, immigrated with her family at the age of nine to the US.

In the Presence of Absence

You grow up at the edge of a world falling apart behind you, and yet to form before you, a world tossed like a stray stone in the game of fates. You ask yourself: Who am I? —Mahmoud Darwish


Now here we are, clinging to opposite shores,
Each reaching a hand out toward the river’s
tongue, thinking somehow our tongues
might save us this time, break
the spell if we could just name it.
—Meg Kearney


You had to choose the margin to know where you stand. The margin is a window looking out on the world. You are neither in it, nor outside it. The margin is a cell without walls. —Mahmoud Darwish


Words. Scattered shards of words.
Gestures of intent and accident.
Idiomatic fragments of yesterday
intimating possible futures.
Yearning for embrace. —DB


One word
—one stone
in a cold river.
One more stone—
I'll need many stones
if I'm going to get over.
—Olav H Hauge


You cannot see what lies ahead clearly. But a horizontal gravity thrusts you into the thick of tomorrow, to an enchanting unknown in an unfinished poem you are about to begin. —Mahmoud Darwish


When one letter is brought together with another, that is to say one absurdity with another, an obscure form reveals the clarity of a certain sound. This slow clarity opens a path for meaning to take the shape of an image. —Mahmoud Darwish


Letters of the alphabet go to war, clinging to one another, standing up, forming words no one wants to shout, sentences that are blown by the mines in the avenues... —Lesyk Panasiuk

NOTES
This, as with much of how we sense, is out-of-context and so very close…
— Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Palestine’s esteemed poet. Excerpts from his final book, In the Presence of Absence (trans Sinan Antoon), an extended mediation on life, an elegy. As such, a guide.
— Meg Kearney from Curse in An Unkindness of Ravens, 2001
— Olav H Hauge (Norwegian 1908-1994), trans Robert Bly
— Lesyk Panasiuk from the anthology In the Hour Of War:  Poetry from Ukraine, 2023)
— DB, this author, from the assemblage Salvage Poetry.

CODA
Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you. —Mahmoud Darwish

Moments in The Dream::September 23

… Live like the grass, not asking: who you are.
Flow like water, not tempting memory.
— Anzhelina Polonskaya

The Marriage Contract


Still Life: The Arrangement


So Much Depends on a Red Pail


Gathering Time


New Map of the Known Universe


Web Hypnotic

Hands of the the Storytellers


She Who Sees All Who Come and Go


Trade for Space


SILENCE Is Deafening


In the Beginning: Erasure


H E L L O ! (G O O D B Y E?)


The Anniversary Celebration

NOTES
Anzhelina Polonskaya from the poem Photo Albums in Paul Klee’s Boat: Selected Poems (2013), trans from Russian by Andrew Wachtel.
Born in Malakhovka near Moscow, Polonskaya, a former figure skater who is banned from publishing in Russia but is translated and published in English by Zephyr Press, lives in Germany.
Anzhelina Polonskaya Discusses Censorship in Russia 2019

    Photo Albums

No question, the first things to be cursed
are photo albums: a girl with a ball and mommy.
A bench, the lilac bush should all be cast onto a bonfire.
And the sun declared outside the law.
Call some thieves - let them make off with the iron bedsteads
where we slept long and straight.
Then cut down the rowan by the fence
so we can't bury the dog beneath it.
There's no call to cry over emptiness.
And without the past in your pockets,
live like the grass, not asking; who are you.
Flow like water, not tempting memory.

TWO CHAIRS 2

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode, 

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store, 

Witnessed itself, already taking place 

In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

    — Seamus Heaney

Two chairs cushion possibility. Any horizon mirrors a dreaming beyond utility. Sit, unfolding. Witness, holding discrete revelation, a quiet recognition. The moment glimmers. Yielding smiling stars who delight in constellating the stories you wish seek to say tell. Sit, listen. Absence of words said. Sighing, instead.

FURTHER

— TWO CHAIRS 1 posted July 1 2022. Click link or menu to 2022 July.

NOTES

— Seamus Heaney (1939-2013, Irish) from the poem Squarings in Seeing Things (1991)

— Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008, Palestinian) from In the Presence of Absence (2006), trans from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon (2011)

Be me so I can be you! Rise up so I can carry you! Come near so I can know you! Go far away so I can know you! 

    — Mahmoud Darwish