Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I am one of three features at the Queer Ink reading this Sun. Here's the shout-out from organizer, Richard Loranger: Please do join us for the Queer Ink reading series this coming Sunday, November 5, from 4 to 6 at the Bowery Poetry Club. Queer poets in the month of Scorpio – how much hotter can it get? This time, we’ll feature three gay poets who will read from recent work, and we will have a brief open mic, so bring a short poem or two if you like. We’ll run it for about 20 minutes, and I’ll allot time according to how many sign up. I will host, as before, as graciously as my Scorpio nature allows, if I can control myself at all,that is. This Sunday, Queer Ink features Jason Schneiderman, author of the recently released Sublimation Point; Michael Montlack, a finalist this year for the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award; and Jee Leong Koh, a terrific reader whose work has been published in both Singaporean and American journals. Copies of their books and journal publications will be avai...

Knowing no Latin (and even less Greek), I am reading Robert Graves's translation of The Twelve Caesars , by Suetonius. The first Caesar is Julius. I have scanned reports of his MSM activities before, and now read the original account with profit and pleasure, as the formula goes. The second-century historian wrote, Caesar first saw military service in Asia, where he went as aide-de-camp to Marcus Thermus, the provincial governor. When Thermus sent Caesar to raise a fleet in Bithynia, he wasted so much time at Nicomedes' court that a homosexual relationship between them was suspected, and suspicion gave way to scandal when, soon after his return to headquarters, he revisited Bithynisa: ostensibly collecting a debt incurred there by one of his freedmen. Julius did not even have camp conditions to blame since his liaisons took place at court where, presumably, a variety of entertainment was available. I wonder how old Julius was then. He couldn't have been more than twenty (or...

(if there's one) the good (if there're such) will separate from the goats, shinny up ladders to (if there) paradise. The goats will butt the ladders down, do what goats do best (check the trash, couple, bleat) and goats do worst (dream of the good dancing down some stairs).

I thought the myth explains the light because we fear the dark; explains life because we fear death; or love, loneliness. I don't mind the dark, family lost because they live, but unmeasured time makes me pray, Let me rest on the Seventh Day.

They're leaving the church. Sunday mass over at Saint Sebastian's Roman Catholic Church. The three wooden doors, through which they pour, resemble the doors set in the Greek skene where, for an audience, violence always happened off-stage. They might see the empty elbows or the swinging body, but they would not see the eyeball greeting the pin of the brooch. For the celebrants at mass, violence happens elsewhere too. Images commemorate facts and so are not the facts: nails are not the nails and, even if they are, have stopped their piercing realization; and the flesh tastes so much like mercy on the tongue, round, hard and bland until saliva salts and softens it, the wafer always tastes of us.

Discussion at American Poetry Journal : Sevenlings by RODDY LUMSDEN The sevenling is a poem of seven lines inspired by the form of this much translated short verse by Anna Akhmatova (1889 - 1966). He loved three things alone: White peacocks, evensong, Old maps of America. He hated children crying, And raspberry jam with his tea, And womanish hysteria. ... And he married me. tr. D M Thomas From Selected Poems (Penguin) The rules of the sevenling are thus: The first three lines should contain an element of three - three connected or contrasting statements, or a list of three details, names or possibilities. This can take up all of the three lines or be contained anywhere within them. Then, lines four to six should similarly contain an element of three, connected directly or indirectly or not at all. The seventh line should act as a narrative summary or punchline or as an unusual juxtaposition. There are no set metrical rules, but being such as short form, some rhythm, metre or rhyme is d...

Video in which PM Lee responded to a press question about how his government views "the gay issue." He frames the question for his government as: "how do we create the maximum space (for gay people to live their lives) without causing it...without it becoming intrusive...and oppressive on the rest of the population, without causing a backlash which will lead to polarization and animosity..."

Two questions to ask of any idea: when it is weak, does it compromise, and when it is strong, does it conquer?

Fall afternoon light streamed into the Met’s mezzanine where I saw the exhibition of Sean Scully’s “Wall of Light” series. Scully painted the first watercolors of the series in 1983-4 when he was studying the stone walls of Maya ruins in the Yucatan. These watercolors look like studies. Their basic element is the brick-like oblong, arranged in sets of three in one painting, and in sets of four in another. Six other works experiment with the use of one, two or multiple colors. Scully returned to these watercolors in the 90s and after, developing them into a series of meditations on the concrete and the evanescent, the abstract and the figurative. The “walls” comprise bricks, or stripes, with soft edges, colors that don’t stay within their lines, and brushstrokes that evoke what the curatorial note calls “a blurry luminosity.” In many of these paintings, for example, “Wall of Light Dark Orange,” 2001, the same color shines between the bricks, suggesting a light behind the wall. The grid ...

Images a Crusoe, Op 11 , by Louis Durey Scenes d'Anabase , by Paul Bowles Beth Anne Hatton, voice Ishmael Wallace, piano Vita Wallace, violin Text read by Jee Leong Koh Excerpts from Exile , text read by R. Nemo Hill Date: October 16, 2006 (Mon) Time: 8 p.m. Place: The Stone, 2nd St & Ave C (www.thestonenyc.com) Tix: $10 St-John Perse , or Alexis Leger, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960. Born in Guadeloupe, the young Alexis felt like an exile when the family moved to France. His sequence, Pictures for Crusoe , gives voice to an old Crusoe who lives, barely, in the city and dreams of returning to his sensual island paradise. From the section titled "The Wall": ...It is the sweat of saps in exile, the bitter oozings of plants with long pods, the acrid insinuation of fleshy mangroves, and the acid delight of a black substance within the pods. It is the wild honey of ants in the galleries of the dead tree. The style is a little too rhapsodic and overblown for my ...

I watched L'Atlante at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday night. Hailed for its poetic realist style, the film struck me as more charming than realist. This is probably due to my distance, both temporal and spatial, from its depiction of a provincial wedding and a honeymoon voyage in a barge. In the film, new wife, Julette, tells her husband, Jean, that, before they have met, she has already seen him in the water of a bucket in which she has plunged her head. If only water has such oracular power! Or the unconscious, which water may symbolize, tells us such certain truths. Still, the idea is charming.

The Whitney devotes the entire fifth floor to Hopper’s paintings and drawings, as a part of its “Full House” anniversary exhibition. The first room looks at Hopper’s Paris apprenticeship. In choosing river and bridges for his subjects, Hopper was clearly influenced by the Impressionists’ emphasis on outdoor light. The paintings, however, do not display the textured brushstrokes that aim to capture the phenomenology of light; they consist of regular shapes colored in with brushstrokes that efface themselves. Hopper’s preoccupation with light is seen in the titles of some of his more famous paintings. “South Carolina Morning” depicts a black woman dressed sexily in red, standing in a doorway, and looking out at bright fields and sky. In “Cape Cod Evening,” an elderly couple, in front of their house, watches their dog play in their long-grass lawn. The grass is light golden, echoed and enriched in the golden brown fur of the dog. Next to, and behind the house, stand dark blue trees. Lig...

This water streams between the banks of a subterranean track. It cannot carry pulp or foam nor shrug them off its back. I've waded in the muddy Nile and walked with Eliot's Thames, dreamt by carp-bellied Singapore, delivering gurgling names. Sure, this foul trickle does not grow from glaciers or from glades, but from the fractured concrete cast silently cascades, still it descends from the same sky as the Ganges and the Styx, elementary the water a rat, fat with rats, sips.