“I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.”
This is the story (Berenice began) of one man, a “man’s man,” a professional valet and a good one.
Do these lines perplex? So did your letter. What kind of explanation is this—your “trip to the country”! Doubt may be a good spur to the imagination, but you have abused and me.
The day after I last wrote, Hodge called to say that Mr.Hood had left town for a few days; until he returned I should keep the briefcase. I had resisted tampering with the elegant box, but this evening I tried the clasp, which was unlocked.
There is, for me, even better news. (“Black oxen cannot tread on my feet forever.”) Mr. Hodge has proposed me for the Knights of the Spindle.
This afternoon I went to the Beach to see a new hotel, the Brissy St. Jouin. It has been described as the “Naples ultra” of Miami splendor.
In August 1877 the celebrated conductor Jenö Szenkar, who six weeks earlier had gone to Graz to visit his friend the violinist Benno Bennewitz, and incidentally to perform with him the cycle of the Beethoven violin sonatas, left that city for Budapest, where he was engaged to conduct two operas at the summer festival.
Mannish Madame Nevtaya slowly cried “Fur bowls!” and the Fideist batter, alert to the sense behind the sound of her words, jogged towards first base. The wind from the northern steppe blew coldly on the close of our season.
The wealthy amateur Grent Wayl invited me to his New York house for an evening’s diversion. Welcoming me, he said: The check of our Bea! pointing to his niece, Miss Beatrice Fod, who, accompanied on the harmonium by her brother Isidore, sang to assembled guests.
oh of course I was often a second time
in rome—but at certain times I was also
actually there for the third or fifth time. when were
On this beautiful Saturday in May
Sophie has married Michel
and Michel has married Sophie
My nails clinging to her black silk net
She drops me, and my forehead strikes
The enchantment of slabs.
Even if the mountain burns itself out, even if the survivors slaughter one another—shepherd, sleep. No matter where. I shall find you.
By a lane of irises and scarlet mud
going down to the spring to dry it up...
There remains only the flutter
Of minute desirable death-pangs
In the high garden once more locked.
Between us,
I have seen the air like, to the haphazard foot, the heat
of the motion of the sun.
Tomorrow, underneath earth, again (I have foundered,
coursed) the colter, as you merge with the body of the day,
props its elbows
They must not settle, the façade
shall revert to the stones.
these mornings
here is a true color
like a curtain behind windowpanes
You acted patiently.
You turned away from the play‚
Which was always beginning;
Removing my watch, pleased with the morning weather,
I dove—I would cross the Atlantic by myself Neither she,
Nor I, nor Brooklyn minded.
In 1970 I was living in France full-time, partly in Paris, partly in a mountain village on the fringe of the Alps. In that year I had the good fortune of becoming friends with the author Georges Perec, who had acquired a modicum of fame when his or…
In 1960 the French novelist, poet and encyclopedist Raymond Queneau, together with his friend Franqois Le Lionnais, a mathematical historian and chess expert, founded a research group, the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature.