I am attracted by the strangeness that surrounds all large cities… In Asnieres there is a nakedness of earthen embankments, wooden shacks inhabited by extraordinary people, skinny horses, nondescript carriages, and stray dogs. I respond to all that, it answers a need I have for sorrowful charm, a love of strange silhouettes…
-Jean-Francois Raffaelli, 1881
De Young Museum Acquires the Absinthe Drinkers
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Delicious food for your eyeballs.
2 weeks ago I went to colombia for a week. It was the first real vacation i’d had in years. Not traveling to see family, not traveling for a training, or for work in some way, but a real honest to god vacation (palm trees, beaches, relaxation and all). But of course a week of adventure, romance, and beauty was not enough. It only wet my palette for all the other places to discover, people to meet, and experiences to be had. I’ve been bitten by the travel bug before and so I am familiar with it’s itch. I have always been a bit of a wanderlust. So now I have half a mind to sell everything I own and go globe-trotting for a few months or years. But for some reason I seem to be convinced that there is work to be done in San Francisco right now. I am building something… a feel something comparable to an actual foundation hardening beneath me (something i’ve never really had), and it is a sensation that is both startling and comforting. But getting my feet back on the ground and returning to the daily grind—-teaching, striving, art studio, networking, launching a start-up business, organizing shows, keeping up with friends, and of course the never ending to-do list of mundane maintenance like emails and laundry—-it all felt so overwhelming and unnecessary. What are we all DOING??? And why can’t I keep my mellow vacation mood whilst doing the urban yogi warrior dance? Hmmm.. well, it is getting easier. With each day that passes, that pink cloud of vacation memory feels like a dream and the concrete here proclaims itself to be reality. But the cloud felt real when i was there, so what is real anyway? It seems like the “real world” everyone refers to all the time is just one version of reality, and since everyone agrees and believes in it, the solidity of its truth grows incredibly convincing… Oh, i don’t know. Its late and i’m tired. I have to wake up early tomorrow and get back at it. Or do i?
I leave you with some snap shots of a reality I briefly found in south america.
Cartagena—>Taganga—>Tayrona…
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
–Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
View Post Aldous Huxley, brave new world, danger, freedom, goodness, poet, sinmy Artist Profile on the Revolver Blog
check out “Artist Profile: Sonya Genel” an interview with me about my art work, art process, and recent show “Twilight of the Kali Yuga” at Revolver (136 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA.) xoxo
My wonderful, beautiful, talented cousin, Natalie Lyalin is a fantastic writer and has just released her new book of poetry!!
Try a Little Time Travel is a study of careening through time, danger in the woods, and lost children. It explores the theme of safety and uncertainty in everyday things. It could be a meditation on the monsters all around us. It could be a good argument for the creation of a time machine. Or it could be a great reason not to ever try.
“Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this—so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you’ll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies—they will pop out of trees.” -ZACHARY SCHOMBURG
Poetry | $10 ($8 direct from UDP)
Hand-bound. 28 pp, 5.5 x 7.5 in.
Letterpress printed cover
Distribution: Direct Only
Series: EEPS
BUY NOW from UDP’s online store.
Read Press Release (PDF)
I Love Those Stags By Natalie Lyalin
I mounted the fake stag.
This one had necklaces hanging on his antlers.
I predicted he could actually hear me.
I was tired.
See, I had been blanching and icing all day.
Also making delicately fried chicken.
I provided cloth napkins for everyone.
They all came over and we drank.
Some said this was a happy moment.
Some promised to never return.
I mounted a cold fake animal in the night.
The highway glittered out like real America racing in circles.
Why, why, why, did they all not go home?
I provided chicken, napkins, opportunity—all of these things.
Still, those crazy cold stags refused to leave.
With a tender stomachache I pretended to dry heave into a bucket.
This sent them galloping into the uncertain night.
Natalie Lyalin was born in Leningrad and currently lives in Philadelphia. She is the author of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009) and a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the co-founder and co-editor of GlitterPony Magazine.
