On my desk are two Goddess figurines, one to hold votary candles and the other contains lamp oil. Both are ceramic. One is a tall slender female figure. The other is as roundly proportioned as the Venus of Willendorf. They both raise their arms above them. The slender figure was given to me by a friend and she is green. The object actually incited a suite of poems. So I get what Goethe meant. But the real cache is on the top of a book shelf immediately behind me. Found and given things. Lots of stones and minerals. But other things too. Just things that perhaps ground me.

Terreson
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>I might as well admit that I pocketed a small bit of gravel from Yeats’s grave once upon a time.

Just more proof (if such were needed, with the forthcoming Conceptual/Flarf feature) that Poetry Magazine has been taken over by cultural hooligans.

Kent
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I don’t know what the “rules” are at present, Jason, but like Smithson’s other earthworks and site installations, Spiral Jetty was created as an entropic work. I’m sure Smithson would have approved of scruffy 22-year old poet-artists on a cross-country pilgrimage taking away a few small stones: a completely different thing than chipping off a piece of paint from a Corot at the Louvre.

All in the spirit of “site displacement”!

Kent
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Quote from Tao te Ching

Goddess Bast

Goddess Hathor

Toy pirate ship

plastic Pegasus model

whalebone owl fetish

Poetry Foundation Pegasus button

etc.
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And yet it’s the “early, very modest” successes that matter, right?

Especially so if those are all one has!

Maybe I peaked too early.
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From the opening track, “Past Time”:

When Campy Campaneris played all nine positions in a game. When Pete Rose demolished Ray Fosse he was never the same. 31 wins and an album on Capitol for Denny McLain. So long ago, so long, Pastime, are you past your prime? The DiMaggios, Shoeless Joe, Minnie Minoso, Yo La Tengo. Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox made the Sox go go. The sideburns of Pepitone and Oscar Gamble’s afro. So long ago, so long, Pastime, are you past your prime? One thing you can say about time is that it always passes. One thing you can say about the game is that it’s not getting any faster. You can get tangled up in a ball of rubber bands and twine, the cowhide and pine tar, snuff, spit and chalk dust lines. Two round-trippers and a no-hitter, that’s Rick Wise (not Bobby Wine). So long ago, so long, Pastime, are you past your prime?
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Mantra? “…the wheel within the clay” by the late, great John Stewart.
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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CranachBrandenburgasJerome.jpg

How he got any work done there, I’ll never know!
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In the library rec-room guest-bedroom at home I put up a post card of Joos van Cleve the Elder’s painting of St. Jerome in his Study, depicting the saint musing over an open book while pointing to a skull on his desk. For a while I really wanted a skull on my desk but never got one.

Here’s a nice bouquet of talismans:

Make a joyful noise, all the earth:
make a loud noise.
With trumpets and sound of cornet
make a joyful noise.
Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
Let the floods clap their hands:
let the hills be joyful together
– Psalm 98 (redacted)

The hills are alive. — Oscar Hammerstein II

Bring the noise. — Chuck D.

No sound is dissonant which tells of life. — Coleridge
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