Three parts of a longer poem by George Albon, from his book Thousands Count Out Loud:

These put me in mind of the summeriness of today: clear moving air, with lots of blue and white in it. These poems come via: Overlap: Drew Gardner’s Blog.

And the title of Albon’s book, Thousands Count Out Loud is, I am sure, taken from Gertrude Stein’s A Grammerian:

Which I found quoted in a long essay about Stein’s creative non-fiction.

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Thanks to Cup of Chicha for the tip.

Thanks to my friend Brian Creswick (whose website will be up this week), I’ve discovered the hilarious and surreal poetry and song of Ivor Cutler:

Cutler is a strange man, and his poems and songs, which he has read and performed on the BBC’s Peel Sessions as well as at festivals and events around the world, are whimsical pieces of aural art, by turns very funny and somehow poignant and sad, as if they have all been written in a minor key. For years he accompanied himself on harmonium, sounding like a Scottish Alan Ginsberg. His poetry needs to be heard to be appreciated. But in case you don’t have a soundcard, here is a little one to read:

The entire cosmos copulation.
	And each thing is word,
				word of love.
		Only love reveals
			but it veils what it reveals,
alone it reveals, 
	alone lover and beloved
in the illuminated solitude,
		the nights of the lovers,
word that never passes
		while the water flows beneath the bridge
		and the slow moon above the houses passes.

"What's you understanding, general, of that first force?"
The journalist Belausteguigoitia asked.
		Sandino replied:
"As a conscious force.  Initially it was love.
That love creates, evolves.  But everything is eternal.
And we are moving towards life being
not a passing moment but an eternity,
through the multiple facets of the ephemeral."

I am noticing lots of pieces of writing out there which are trying to find ways of understanding the primal creation in terms of it’s echo in the universe that we have come to inhabit. Of course, Cardenal’s masterwork continually points us in this direction. So too does Edgar Allen Poe’s “Eureka: A prose poem.” And also this, from Bruce Cockburn:

I’m on a bit of a kick with this stuff at the moment. Know of any other pieces that fit the mold?

The Ecotone wiki, a collaborative project by bloggers who write about place, gets it’s official launch this week with a collection of essays about how we all came to write about place.

My contribution, from my Bowen Island Journal, is about how I began to see the world through the eyes of an exile while I was living in England as a kid. Others at the Ecotone wiki seem to also be drawing on both their childhood experiences and experiences of moving, and being dislocated as some point in their lives. I think it is this dislocation that gives us the lens through which we come to see the place in which we live.

Fred First in Floyd County, Virginia, USA puts some legs on this idea, and its implications, in his post:

We will be writing once every two weeks on a different topic. Feel free to join us.