It’s a bit long, but the fits of epilepsy help you keep going. I recommend trying to keep track of the names on a separate piece of paper, at least at the beginning—those multiple, long Russian names get tricky!

Here’s my review of this book.

The book tackles some heavy themes - politics, war, and the individual - but the poems are melodramatic and weepy messes.

“I saw a girl looking at me across the room literally out of the corner of her eye as if her head had been immobilized by the performers and yet the will to freedom remained and she was calculating her escape: this is of course an overinterpretation.”

“Twenty-five years later the words that had passed between them were unalterably compromised by everything they had come to know in the meantime.”

Some of Christopher Isherwoods poems, essays, and short stories that hadn’t been included in other collections. It has its moments: “Even today it often disgusts me to read a newspaper in which there is no mention of my name.” Wrote more about it here.

An obsession with radios. No. An obsession with sound. No. An obsession with communication. No. An obsession with what cannot be communicated. Perhaps.

There’s an I, a You and a DJ. The I sometimes seems to work at a radio station, and is obsessed with static. You is trying to become a radio-bird, with a scrachy, staticky heart. And the book of poems itself doesn’t have the sort of definitive narrative that I’m creating for it here.

The difference between sound and static, music and noise, communication and just talk to fill the space.

Perhaps important to read because it’s a seminal book. Freud’s a bit verbose; wish he’d edited it down to the essentials, because 600+ pages is a long long read—

A dreamy poem in fragments —

A moonlight like gauze, no –

of course it’s not, but wouldn’t we
want it to be so?
As if that little glow tore open a hole
in your arm & somebody
bandaged you softly up?

Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk is full of almost-narratives: The theft of a Francis Bacon painting and its aftermath , the detritus of a colorful car accident, boys’ games and pranks, mysterious ladders, and an Anna that enters and exits the book without warning.

A telephone requires so much proximity
it almost
defeats the purpose.

I finally finished reading Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems — and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Wallace Stevens poems I like are his greatest hits, i.e. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” This makes me feel like a bit of a dilettante…. There’s the odd feeling that someone who studies poetry should like the B-sides better.

Strange, haunting, and confusing. A book I’m teaching in my spring semester class on surrealism.