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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 16h

And, out of a little anthology of translated lines North calls “First (French) Licks,” a slyly offhand version of Verlaine’s “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou! / Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie, / De rendre un peu la Rime assagie. / Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où?” (“Art Poétique”).

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 16h

A lovely new poem out of Charles North’s _News, Poetry and Poplars: Poems / Selected Prose_ (Black Square Editions, 2024). Oh for an “impulse as palpable as a hawk”—its push of tenable music.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 18h

If you click on "draught" (in the upper left), you'll get a page reading

draught
(finally, a citation)

If you scroll down from there, you'll see a number of photographs beginning to pile up. Each photograph links to an essay. I agree, hard to navigate.

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Reposted by John Latta

Draught @draughtjournal.bsky.social · 22h

Draught is now live!
www.draughtjournal.com
Issue 1.1.1 with contributions by Glenn Adamson, Jen Calleja, Don Mee Choi, Mark Cousins, Daisy Lafarge, Mark Manders, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lisa Robertson, Christina Tudor-Sideri and Francesca Wade

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 1d

Deadly gray sky, fifty-seven degrees and drizzle, the vituperating socius: I could easily sit here listening to Etta James’s sweet semi-growl through that swelling panoply of strings to the end of it all . . .

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2d

Different poems with the same title, mash-ups, poems of relentless refrains, or repetitions (“Everything That Rises,” “Cotton Block”), a poem reminiscent of a round, or a braid. Here’s another. “Grey honeycomb” of thinking, prayer caught in the hammer’s claw.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 2d

Out of Alicia Wright’s You’re Called by the Same Sound (Thirdhand Books, 2025). Formal restlessness, a book of tryings out, here in the form of a plat map. A book soaked in particulars of history and place (Rome, Ga. and environs). “The ledger the fissure the sin of the dog the angel of history.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 3d

Out of Juan José Saer’s unfinished La Grande: the phenomenology of apprehending the “uninterrupted flight” of the world. Memory (and reading, and writing) as “a series of disconnected and ecstatic fragments.” (Died in Paris 11 June 2005, leaving only title and first line of a projected 20 pp. coda.)

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 3d

Thanks for the suggestions and possibilities. I think my French is far less nuanced than yours. I did try searching _Alcools_ for a few words I thought _must_ be in the line, to no avail. I found, too, that I was puzzling the same line (and missing source) at my blog Isola di Rifiuti c. 2010.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 4d

Spent an extravagantly long spell today trying to locate the source line (by, I think, Apollinaire) for what I once, rather unseriously, translated as “I ticked off my years & they fled.” Had associated it with a line in “Cortège”—“Rien n’est mort que ce qui n’existe pas encore.” No, & no luck.

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Reposted by John Latta

Timothy Noah @timothynoah.bsky.social · 5d

The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building is, one expert told me, “the Sistine Chapel of New Deal art.” GSA had a plan earlier this year to save it. Now Trump is rushing to sell it.

Save the Cohen, part 2, explains how we got here. Please share widely!

newrepublic.com/article/2012...

There Was a Plan to Save These New Deal Masterpieces. Then Trump Won.

A feasibility study was underway about restoring the ailing federal building that houses important Ben Shahn frescoes, Philip Guston murals, and other FDR-era artwork. But the Trump administration put...

newrepublic.com

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Reposted by John Latta

Timothy Noah @timothynoah.bsky.social · 6d

Re-posting my Tuesday story on the imminent sale and likely destruction of government-owned murals by Ben Shahn and Philip Guston. The Trump administration is a cascade of emergencies; this one requires rapid mobilization by preservationists. Followup tomorrow.

newrepublic.com/article/2010...

The New Deal Masterpieces Threatened by Trump’s D.C. Downsizing

Your great-grandparents paid Ben Shahn and Philip Guston to create gorgeous public murals. Next year they could be rubble.

newrepublic.com

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 6d

Always liked the Mandelstam phrase "the noise of time." And just recently learned "noise" is serving to translate the Russian _shum_. Mysterious and wonderful.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 6d

See, too, David Larsen’s Names of the Lion (2017), a wonderful book.

Names of the Lion by David Larsen

By Ibn Khālawayh, Translated by David Larsen Description Reviews Bio Winner of the 2018 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets Poet and scholar David Larsen’s Englis...

www.wavepoetry.com

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 6d

Thanks, I didn’t know that. Published in the April 1955 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Stevens died in August of that year.

John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 6d

More flux and (momentary, provisional) adhesions. Here’s a Wallace Stevens (b. 2 October 1879) poem I think about with an alarming frequency, a tiny stay in this “always incipient cosmos”:

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d

Or A. R. Ammons: “The mind can’t perceive except by limiting, by blocking things off, by naming them. The moment the line has been drawn, fidelity to nature is impossible, because it has no sharp lines, but only the massive events of transition. . . .There are no ends in nature.” Flux and adhesion.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d

One _La Grande_ character dabbles in philosophy, studying (surely a sidelong grin here) “the ontology of becoming.” I think of Fenollosa: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only . . . the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d

Query out of Juan José Saer’s novel _La Grande_ (Open Letter, 2014), translated by Steve Dolph: “What is a novel?” Reply: “The decomposition of continuous movement.” Appended: “…in the sense of representing, through an analytic and static form what in fact is synthetic and dynamic.”

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 7d

Oh dear. Hope it's not as severe as it looks.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8d

The life of Saint Cuthbert (“After standing all night in a freezing river as penance, two otters warmed and dried his feet.”) recalls my own rather fatuous version, source unknown, in Some Alphabets (2022). Ample sign of how my early aughts job of proofreading Early English texts gummed up my lingo.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8d

Dipped into Eliot Weinberger’s exquisite (and frequently funny) Angels & Saints (Christine Burgin/New Directions, 2020). The illustration depicts "four converging hexagons. Meditates on the 365¼ days in the year, captures 365 letters in its overlaid shapes.” Densities of significance go abstract.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8d

Reminds me of a line in the Wim Wenders film Im Lauf der Zeit (1976), distributed with English subtitles as Kings of the Road. Toward the end of the film one of the characters says something like “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.” I think now the Internet may’ve done that to everybody.

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John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 10d

That's a wild eclectic bunch! Good to see Dahlberg therein.

John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 10d

Love the Abbott line!

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