1.
Untitled — by James Kriszyk
From the Community
“An artist without a deadline is a lost cause”
— James Kriszyk
2.
Tape for the Turn of the Year — a poem by Archie Ammons
From the Internet
Here is an excerpt from Archie Ammons’ unedited manuscript scroll, which you can also download as a PDF for free, below.
I feel a bit different: my prolog sounds posed & phony: I feel maybe I betrayed my own depth by over—simplification, a kind of smugness, unjustified sense of security: last night I read about the geologic times of the Northwest, the periodic eruptions into great lava plateaus, forests grown, stabilized, and drowned between eruptions— or drowned, buried by the latest eruption: and I read how in the last 10,000 years (a bit of time) the glaciers have been melting, some now unfed, disconnected, lying dead and dissolving in high valleys: and I thought my God how strange we are here, how raw, new and ephemeral our lives and cultures, how unrelated to the making of caves and canyons: how the lands float up and down, unseen unnoticed by the sudden rapid turning over of our generations we, rapids, in a valley that millenially sinks: nothing is simple, but should I contribute verbally to the complexity? the question sounds phony, as if I already don’t believe in the answer: I mean to stay on the surface, then, the crusty, rocky, hard—clear surface; tho congealed the surface will reflect the depths, the luid, hot motions and inner-motions where, after all, we do not live: the surface brings to clarity certain of those motions: 10,000 yrs Troy was burned since then but the earth has been ’’resting” - entering a warm cycle: the Sumerians had not, that long ago, written about their holy bundle of the elements of civilization, nor had one city state stold it from another: ten thousand years: how many Indians is that, fishing the Northern Coast, marrying, and just living? they came and went and left little sign on the warming trend: I hadn’t meant to have such a long prolog: it doesn’t seem classical to go ahead without a plan: but I wonder what plan the Indians had 8M years ago: the thought defines our sphere for us: why should a world be bigger than what a man can reach and taste and strike & burn & hunt & screw: bigger than that is metaphysics which tho entertaining is inedible and unsurrendering: what is 10,000 years to us? we are blips on radar screens: the other side is, of course, that in the blip is all inperishable possibility: not ’’unity” , not "all”— but the "full” the ’’complete": man in his moments can have that but if he tries to surround his mind & world and say all in a single word, he will kill himself: we may mourn him, his courage, but we may merely say, ”Whv couldn’t he break loose and live?”
By the way, I picked this up from Austin Kleon’s newsletter. If you like Three Things, you’d probably like his publication too - I partially stole the idea from him… like an artist. This segues us nicely on to…
3.
Steal Like an Artist - by Austin Kleon
From the Offline World
The hard copy is a wonderful artefact - easy to read and pleasant to look at. The audiobook version (available on Audible as part of a trilogy for 1 credit, for those of you who have a subscription) is also great company when driving alone.
FEBRUARY’S PLAYLIST
We’re leading into the end of February and finally ushering in the beginnings of Spring. Here are our latest musical finds this month that we’d like to share with you!