On My Desk


Cesar Vallejo, *Aphorisms*, translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler, Green Integer, 2002

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"I love plants for the root, not for the flower."

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"Nature creates eternity of substance. Art creates eternity of form."

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"My simple anarchy, my great pain composed of joys."

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"Aviation in air, in water and spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies."

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"CAREFUL with the human substance of poetry."

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Frank Hlton, *Baudelaire in Chains: A portrait of the artist as a drug addict*, Peter Owen, 2004

"'There are moments when I'm seized by a desire to sleep for ever; but I cannot sleep anymore, because I'm always thinking...So, to sum up, it has been *demonstrated* to me this year that I could really earn money, and with application and persistence, a lot of money. But the disorders already mentioned, unceasing poverty, a new deficit to make up, the wearing away of my energy by little worries and finally, in a word, my tendency to reverie have nullified everything.' For reverie, read 'opium'. The former is a favourity euphemism for the drug among all the literary opium users of the time. For Baudelaire, it means a phantom world of dreams and plans and projects for poems,plays, articles, novels, stories- all revolving endlessly in his mind, repetitively listed among his papers but rarely developed beyond that point."

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Tom Beckett on Prime Time

Nicholas Manning announces "The Continental Review: videos of and by poets; the first issue includes a video by Tom Beckett.