Sunday, December 07, 2014

Frank Conroy re "No Money"/Jim Spitzer Paintings/"Legacy"?/Jean Cocteau/Pat Nolan's New Book/Buy John's Book/Gordon Walmsley's Daisy/

That great writer of fiction Frank Conroy (not Pat), in his sensitive
bildungsroman Body & Soul, presents an imagined meeting between   Aaron Copland and protagonist Claude Rawlings with the following pronouncement from the great American composer,   There's very little money in composing, Mr. Rawlings.  But we're not unique.  Robert Frost once told me he'd never been able to support himself from his royalties alone.  Can you imagine that?  The most popular poet in the richest country in the world?

  It's crazy,  Claude said and meant it.

  It's a nuisance.  Money is a nuisance.

 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Some Recent Paintings by Jim Spitzer






















See more Spitzer paintings and/or purchase

 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.
 
Something On "Legacy"

 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Good Stuff - Fragments From Jean Cocteau's  
Diary of an Unknown

It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance.  Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.  Poetry, being elegance itself, cannnot hope to achieve visibility.  In that case, you ask me, of what use is it?  Of no use.  Who will see it"  No one.  Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind.  It is enough for poety to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work.  It insists on living its own life.  It becomes the pretext for a thousand midunderstandings that go by the name of glory.

Glory is absurd, stemming as it does from the herding instinct.  A crowd gathers around an accident, discusses it, reinvents it, worries at it until it has become something wholly different.

Beauty is always the result of an accident.  Of a violent lapse between acquired habit and those yet to be acquired.  It baffles and disgusts.  It may even horrify.  Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident.  It becomes classical and loses its shock value....

...Poetry is a religion without hope...Poetry is an ethic... a secret code of behavior...Once a young woman who was arguing with me cried out, "Your truth is not mine!"  I should hope not.

...any work that persuades too readily, will be but a decorative fantasy.

...As it develops, this ethic will become a kind of insult.  It will persuade only those who are able to abandon themselves to a greater force, and those who love more than they admire.  It will accumulate neither subscribers not admirers.  It will only make friends.
  Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

Pat Nolan Reading From His New Nullain House Poetry Collection  Your Name Here At  Iota Press in Sebastopol, CA November 9th 2014





Disprove the notion of No Money In Poetry by pressing
Buy Pat's collection here











ELIXIR OF YOUTH

Distracted by a hair
the archeology of my desk
shifted layer by layer
what great discoveries
wait to be made among
paper thin strata

paper paper everywhere
not a pen to be found

expansiveness of dusky fall day
frost curled leaves early morning
car rooftops spangled wet
an angled light spreads cresting
rising moisture illuminated as pure haze

I have found the elixir of youth
mix with water and
I’m good for another millennium

hot water flavored with dried leaves
hot water flavored with ground roasted beans
hot water alone for that ascetic effect

though these days it’s more
about neurosis than consciousness
I live in my language wear it
like a comfortable pair of jeans
and an old faded t-shirt

chatter rising

out of the void and its silence
comes mind and truth breath brings
life and its aspirant word

(originally published in Big Bridge 10

 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


And while your buying Xmas presents, continue disproving the No Money In Poetry notion by buying John Coletti's City Lights collection Deep Code here at Amazon or Directly from City Lights below

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Code-City-Lights-Spotlight/dp/0872866491

  
http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100279000

 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.

 Also consider poet Gordon Walmsley's first novel.  It's unique and covers Hurricane Katrina and all things New Orleans and Philosophical.  Walmsley hails from New Orleans and Copenhagen.  More here at this Amazon link.



 Comment or Read Comments Here  on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net, and I can post it.


Rare Footage of Jack Micheline Reading/A.D. Winans/Photos from Festival of The Long Poem/ Coletti Works/ Etc.

Jack Micheline and Al Winans (right to left in this cool painting by Jason Hardung) click for  Jack Micheline Reading A. D. Winans Remembers...