Goby’s Journal, Sacred and Profane

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The impossibility of reconciling ecstatic experiences with doing dishes, taking a shit.

Is the recreational use of drugs, a profanation of the sacred?

Not a week goes by that I don’t dream of building and firing kilns.

Fires of transformation.

There is no locality of space in my dreams. A room becomes a flight of stairs becomes a field becomes a storm at sea.

Jerome Rothenberg at Kelly Writer’s House

Poems for the millennium, volume 5: ‘Barbaric Vast & Wild,’ now published & available from Black Widow Press

I went to Kelly Writer’s House tonight, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, to hear Jerome Rothenberg, and bought a copy of what’s likely the last of his great series of Assemblages, as he prefers to call them. Outsider and subterranean poetries. Without having it in mind, I realized as soon as I opened it, that I’ve been spiritually preparing for this book for many months.
He read from this, and some of his own poetry… and from the former, some beautifully dark Mother Goose rhymes–that reveal the desperation and poverty that were their condition. I love what Rothenberg has done–a life time of opening the closed canonical doors to the vast range of poetries of all times and places.

While I appreciate Kelly Writer’s House, and feel fortunate beyond words to have heard over the years, so many poets–so many voices, representing so many different poetries, I confess to have felt tonight, a tinge of cognitive dissonance in this setting–a gathering of academics in this institution of wealth and privilege that could not possibly be more ‘insider.’ I know that, while in no way made to feel unwelcome there, a sense of myself being more and more, an “outsider” there.  I wish that more of the Philly poets I know could have been there.

Aphorisms of Aesthetic Power*

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*I say, power rather than energy, because it is what it does, not what it is.

Aesthetic power is not exhausted in the effects it engenders, is not a part, but is in itself, a whole within a greater, infinitely dispersed power.

Infinitely dispersed, and specific to its form thus: extensive beyond the specific form that holds, but does not contain it.

It is not an experience, but engenders release from experience by displacement of the subject by the object, and of the object become subject—this is the lighting flash of the sublime.

There can be no judgment because there are no means to measure or compare its power.

It is not judgment, but the annihilation of judgment.

Beauty is to aesthetic power as the trace of an atomic particle in a cloud chamber is to the energy that moves the particle.

The release of aesthetic power is dangerous, destructive of all order, compelling the creation of new forms, new order—which, while indirectly the products of aesthetic power, are but the dead castes of that power—like the glass castes fused in sand by strikes of lightning.

It is nothing without us, as we are nothing without the bodies it violates.