(after DeCamp’s ‘The Blue Kimono’)

There is a wind blowing
Down the avenue’s gullet
	
A gray wind is blowing
Through the black
Hair of two little girls swinging
From the light poles

Is blowing
Through their checkered dresses 
& the creaking shutters of a sky opening 
                          And closing over the round 
Faced sun.

Down in the fields
               A wild wind is blowing
Through the legs of men
Dribbling a soccer ball,  

Is blowing
Through the shirt sleeves 
Of kites, oscillating strings
                Of daydreams  
& an open window at which a woman
                   in a blue kimono, is sitting
And watching

Her sockets filled with crushed blue
Glass,
                 a wind blowing
Through pages of poems

Unwritten.

[1] Absurdity

On a bookstore’s flashy electronic display, names of people born this day, and falling in the following categories: industrialists, sitcom actors, movie stars, pop queens, and fashion models. If you could notice who were not covered – writers, poets, philosophers - those animate ghosts of bookstores –you perhaps have seen the absurdity, moving like a blood clot, to the heart of United States of America

[2] Random lines, understood and not understood, from here and there

Peregrina paloma imaginara Que enardeces los ultimos amores Alma de lut, de musica y de flores Peregrina paloma imaginara – Ricardo Jaimes Freire, a Bolivian poet

Bad is Bach! – Slogan on a t-shirt

Glittergates of elfinbone – James Joyce

[3] Approximately two visual thoughts

An fundamental visual pattern – echoing Borges’s twelve patterns of metaphor in poetry – is the gesture of a woman’s hand playing with her hair, perhaps placing it behind her ear, perhaps letting it fall across her face. Even though he has seen this before, he always experiences a sharp aesthetic pleasure in observing this gesture.

An artist facing a blank sheet of paper with paints and brushes perhaps finds it a little easier to capture a face, with all it planes, angles and curves, that someone facing the same sheet with words.

On seeing a woman’s red hanging earrings, I also see my sister’s first set of earrings, also red and hanging, after her ears were punched some twenty years ago.

[1] The Riddle of Poetry

· Poetry, and even books of poetry, is something beyond aesthetic theories

· Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars.

· … books are only occasions for poetry.

· A poem is a book is dead until someone reads it.

· Art happens only when we read a poem

· I must confess that I think a book is not really an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshipped, but rather an occasion for beauty.

· So we needn’t really worry about the fate of ‘classics’?

· Greek: oinopa pontos. English: wine-dark sea.

· Sometimes beauty is also created by how language and the reader simply shift in and with time.

· And at the end of it, poetry is impossible to define in language.

[2] Metaphor

· Every word is a dead metaphor.

· That sentence is a metaphor in itself, and is true in an etymological sense.

· Twelve or so ‘stock patterns’ of metaphors can be identified at work in various poems.

· Chesterton: A monster made of thousand eyes? Night sky

· Stevenson: a mere animal, the color of flowers? A woman

· The effectiveness of Chuan Tzu’s beautiful poem of metaphor – a man dreaming he was a butterfly etc – hinges on the use of butterfly. It would have not been as beautiful if he had used, say a tiger, a whale or a typewriter instead.

· The beauty of Frost’s repetition of the line ‘and miles to go before I sleep’, lies in its allusive use of metaphor. Miles = life. Sleep = death.

· Some metaphors, like the Anglo Saxon kenning – sea = whale road – cannot be traced back to one of the stock patterns of metaphor.

to be completed later