Monique
03-27-2004, 07:26 AM
from “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things”
…That was the simple life. There they were, sturdy with boots, pipes, and notebooks, chopping wood for the fire, observing birds, checking out the sunset, the sunrise, the changing seasons. Shrewd and loving observations of their neighbours, who had finally after all this time come to regard them as acceptable...Nauseating stuff. These dolts keep these enormous notebooks in which they tell us city slickers all about nature and their lives in Maine or Big Sur, or Colorado, or some other goddamned place, full of trees and the rest of the stuff poesy. God, what a fucking bore it all is. They lead the simple life, they note all this trash down in those damned notebooks. "Observe the turning of the leaves." "What bird call was that I heard this morning in the icy stillness?" …"Today I finally got the old stump out. Celebrated with a half-pint of applejack." And we read this swill. Not one year goes by but some little magazine runs excerpts from one of these "woods journals" by a poet– there is also a small collection of his verse in the same issue. The poems have titles like: "Top of Pink Tit Mountain: Cold Beans." And we sit choking on the polluted air of drivers cities, marveling at the freedom that can open the world of such verse to its practitioner... all about Being Alive In The Fresh Air And Living With Your Woman And Eating Good Food And Smoking Pot And Watching Your Woman Getting Dinner Ready The Way Her Simple Skirt Molds Itself To Her Full Hips Outside The Voices Of The Children As The Evening Comes Down On The Mountains Fuck You America You Can't Change This.
-Gilberto Sorrentino
…That was the simple life. There they were, sturdy with boots, pipes, and notebooks, chopping wood for the fire, observing birds, checking out the sunset, the sunrise, the changing seasons. Shrewd and loving observations of their neighbours, who had finally after all this time come to regard them as acceptable...Nauseating stuff. These dolts keep these enormous notebooks in which they tell us city slickers all about nature and their lives in Maine or Big Sur, or Colorado, or some other goddamned place, full of trees and the rest of the stuff poesy. God, what a fucking bore it all is. They lead the simple life, they note all this trash down in those damned notebooks. "Observe the turning of the leaves." "What bird call was that I heard this morning in the icy stillness?" …"Today I finally got the old stump out. Celebrated with a half-pint of applejack." And we read this swill. Not one year goes by but some little magazine runs excerpts from one of these "woods journals" by a poet– there is also a small collection of his verse in the same issue. The poems have titles like: "Top of Pink Tit Mountain: Cold Beans." And we sit choking on the polluted air of drivers cities, marveling at the freedom that can open the world of such verse to its practitioner... all about Being Alive In The Fresh Air And Living With Your Woman And Eating Good Food And Smoking Pot And Watching Your Woman Getting Dinner Ready The Way Her Simple Skirt Molds Itself To Her Full Hips Outside The Voices Of The Children As The Evening Comes Down On The Mountains Fuck You America You Can't Change This.
-Gilberto Sorrentino