Tuesday, March 19, 2013

"The Most Exciting Thing To Do With Your Head"
A great essay "interview" by Sam Anderson with the amazing Anne Carson in the New York Times Magazine. I think you can check it out here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html?ref=magazine&_r=0

I'm really looking forward to her new book, Red Doc>


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Also -- I love this poem by Dana Levin from today's Poem a Day:

The Gods Are in the Valley
by Dana Levin
The mind sports god-extensions.

It's the mountain from which
the tributaries spring: self, self, self, self--

rivering up
on curling plumes
from his elaborate
head-piece

of smoke.

His head's on fire.

Like a paleolithic shaman
working now in the realm of air, he

folds his hands--

No more casting bones
for the consulting seeker, this gesture

seems to mean.
Your business, his flaming head suggests,

is with your thought-machine.

How it churns and churns.

Lord Should and Not-Enough,
Mute the Gigantor, looming dumb

with her stringy hair--

Deadalive Mom-n-Dad (in the sarcophagi
of parentheses

you've placed them)--

He's a yogi, your man
with a hat of smoke. Serene, chugging out streams

of constructed air...

Mind's an accident
of bio-wiring, is one line of thinking.

We're animals that shit out
consciousness, is another.

The yogi says:
you must understand yourself

as projected vapor.
Thus achieve your

superpower.



Copyright © 2013 by Dana Levin. Used with permission of the author.


About this Poem:
"The poem was sparked by a drawing accompanying an 8th Century Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. To me, the drawing makes an argument for the multiplicity of self, the projected self, the vaporous, ever-changing nature of self: self as smoke. Something of continuous interest to me."

Dana Levin

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