“They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs.”
- Bob Dylan

I recently read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One with considerable pleasure.

It’s an engaging book: Dylan combines reminiscences about his inner life with thoughtful anecdotes about people he’s known over the decades.

This passage really caught my eye:

Danny [Lanois] asked me what I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it … be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came — there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s honestly how I felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying down the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.

- Bob Dylan: Chronicles, Volume One

I love that phrase, “hurling horses over cliffs” ….

“His deeper tragedy was to perish in the madhouse that his Serbia became, a stricken nation where the poets and criminals cannot tell each other apart.”

I hear with shock that my very close friend, a great Serbian poet, died in a Belgrade clinic haunted by Dragan Dabic, whose “quantum human energy” obviously cannot cure lung cancer. My friend the poet never committed genocide, nor did he ever hide from justice by stealing the identity of an innocent man. He wrote his verse about his beloved city and he published books. He also smoked too much to survive, but his mortality was not his sorest problem, because his verse outlives him. His deeper tragedy was to perish in the madhouse that his Serbia became, a stricken nation where the poets and criminals cannot tell each other apart.

- Jasmina Tešanović @ Boing Boing: Link.

Thought for Today:

Since I am one of those people who work under pressure or not at all, it seems better to have a full-time job, if only as an alibi.

- D.J. Enright @ The Writer’s Almanac: Link.

“Dennis Joseph Enright (March 11, 1920 – December 31, 2002) was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic, and general man of letters.”
- Wikipedia: Link.

“All poets are sending religious messages …”

I think that all poets are sending religious messages, because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another … and to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.

- Richard Wilbur @ Writer’s Almanac: Link

Richard Wilbur @ Wikipedia

Thought for today:

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

- Plato: link.

Plato @ Wikipedia.

Thought for today:

Do not commit your poems to pages alone, sing them I pray you.

- Virgil (70-19 BC): Link.

Virgil @ Wikipedia: Link.

Thought for today:

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.

It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot’s last words (1890)
(Blackfoot warrior and orator)

“The poet must not avert his eyes. You have to take a bold look at what is your environment, what is around you. Even the ugly things, even the decadent things …”

Interview with Werner Herzog:

Herzog on filmmaking: “The world is just not made for filmmaking. Every time you make a film you must be prepared to wrestle it away from the Devil himself. But carry on, dammit! Ignite the fire. Ultimately, the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.”

Via Big Man Tabasco Sauce.

Werner Herzog @ Wikipedia.

You can lead a horse to water

But if you want to drown it

You have to do it with your own two hands.

look around you, breeding your own collapse

before you know it you’ll be living like rats

more and more cannon fodder for the fanatics

depleted uranium leaching into the tigris

more blood to infuse the military industrial simplex virus

your self-induced fear and greedy fecundity

provide those soul less bastard with holy roller’s take of the taxes

they divide and conquer the populace

with splintering attacking on those more or less defenseless

railing and ranting against special interests

save their main, cancerous, to keep you all rabbitting along in ignorance

while they extract eden’s treasures, provided with government vouchers

leaving behind a scorched, sulfurous furnace

- Mark Jacobs, 10 March 2006 (”not the designer, not the St. Paul playwright; the hack cartoonist, bass player and instigator of punchline rock”)