Saturday, November 30, 2013

from what is everywhere







I came back I say
I knew you’d come back she says

I arrived here in a boat of ten years I say
Yes she says
I often spoke to you
with tips of my fingers
with thumps of the heart with blood
and with the world’s beauty

I was deaf and blind I say
That’s true she says
I often stood behind a chair
argued with you through your toil
and your suffering

You were patient I say
I had faith she says
It’s possible to be blind
but impossible to walk away
from what is everywhere

I came back I say
though I thought there was no return

A Talk with Mother by Anna Kamieńska, in Astonishments (translated by G. Drabik and D. Curzon)

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

You need something to open up a new door / 
To show you something you seen before


Bob Dylan at a press conference at the 
Savoy 
Hotel in London in 1966.
 

This is the essence of the popular arts in America: Be a magpie, take from everywhere, but assemble the scraps and shiny things you’ve lifted in ways that not only seem inventive, but really do make new meanings. Fabrication is elemental to this process — not fakery, exactly, but the careful construction of a series of masks through which the artist can not only speak for himself, but channel and transform the vast and complicated past that bears him or her forward.


Bob Dylan from "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie" - at a press conference at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1966.