Tuesday, 18 June 2013

Harris Schiff: New York


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An occupier on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012



If you are going to
         
            jump out the window

                                             please


                                                         please

            lemme go through your pockets first




Harris Schiff: New York, from One More Beat, 2012

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Yankee Stadium: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

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Memorial Day fireworks over Asbury Park oceanfront: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

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A tattered American flag: instagram by David Shankbone, 28 May 2012

8 comments:

  1. Can it be the best poet-mind of my generation has been surviving on rice & beans (16 cents a pound) and bananas (3 for a dime) in certain Third World countries? (Hint, not including China or Switzerland.)

    "Me, I have fallen totally out of the United States of America!"

    Harris Schiff directs two new poems from the Planet of the Abused to us -- the We Who Are About To Die, If We Were Not In Fact Brain-Dead Already

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  2. Oh, those spook contractors from the DC tech corridors must be looking for bargains in past-sell-by-date produce -- they were all over this one like fruit flies on bad bananas in a matter of moments. Happy encephalitis, guys! Quelle désillusion! There's No Escape from New York!

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  3. (Not that they don't do great cover -- "just say Mark Zuckerberg sent you, knock three times, and invoke the Celestial Sanctity of the Office".)

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  4. Tom,

    "the visual mind is so much quicker than the eye"

    6.18

    light coming into sky above still black
    ridge, bird slanting toward pine branch
    in foreground, sound of wave in channel

    “constant” of second member
    complication, logical

    problem of space, from form
    the field, the system

    blinding silver edge of sun above ridge,
    fog on horizon to the left of the point

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  5. Steve,

    complication, logical

    problem of space, from form
    the field, the system

    Yes, that's where all this plays out, exactly. And memory keeps it all green. That bright diamond, in the mind.

    What else was poetry meant to be for, after all?

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  6. The reading: almost unbearably moving, a small tear in that seamless web (he says, thinking wishfully).

    It's the please repeated that does it for me.

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  7. Excellent to hear your thoughts, as always, Duncan and Nin.

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