Versboken by Britt G. Hallqvist (1969)

Disaster Supplies: June

Och tid förgår och tid sträcks ut, och tid

är som ett återfall i en lång sjukdom.

/ Rainer Maria Rilke, Rekviem

Big Questions #14 by Anders Nilsen: Title and Deed

The Idiot. The tears. The drama. 

Next issue will be the last. How will I ever-

Buy/preview.

Anticipation: N.B.

Disaster Supplies: May

Vad finns det kvar åt oss som nu behöver

vartenda ord som svarar mot ett gränslöst

i omätbara avstånd utlagt Hades.

Harry Martinson, Aniara (1956)

Robert Crawford on T.S. Eliot's "Marina"

Just found my favourite lecture at last year's T.S. Eliot International Summer School online: T.S. Eliot's Daughter, held by poet and professor of Scottish literature Robert Crawford. Not only is Marina one of the poems I keep the closest, but Crawford seemed to have a certain (poet's) understanding that really shone through in his lecture, something which I perhaps felt other lectures lacked.


There was a quite special moment afterwards, when Seamus Heaney, to end a rather excited discussion on the meaning of the poem's epigraph Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? (*) in relation to the rest of the poem's recalling the recognition scene in Shakespeare's Pericles (**), suddenly said that it must be understood as a tuning fork for the rest of the poem, and nothing else. Some of us sighed out of gratitude for that on point remark.


TSE reading Marina.


(*) "What place is this, what kingdom, what shores of the world?" Taken from Seneca the Younger's tragedy Hercules Furens, where these words are uttered by Hercules himself as he recovers from the insanity during which he has murdered his wife and children. 


(**) Pericles, in mourning for his wife and for Marina, the daughter who is for long thought to be dead, has left his kingdom for the sea. To hopefully rouse him from his despair, a young woman is put before him to sing. As she tells him her life story they both realize that they are in fact father and daughter.

Bakom garden by Åsa Sandell

Currently Reading: Oates

The writer contemplates his opposite in the boxer, who is all public display, all risk and, ideally improvisation: he will know his limit in a way that a writer, like all artists, never quite knows his limits - for we who write live in a kaleidoscopic world of ever-shifting assessments and judgments, unable to determine whether it is revelation or supreme self-delusion that fuels our most crucial efforts.

On Boxing (1987)

Disaster Supplies: April

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. 

Ellis Island by Georges Perec

Imagine Ellis Island. According to Perec, 3.000 people took their own lives on the tiny island between 1892 and 1924. 

Disaster Supplies: February

Var alla avsked i förväg, som vore de redan

bakom dig, liksom den vinter som gått. 

Ty bland vintrar finns en där den ändlösa ledan

givit ditt övervintrade hjärta sitt rikliga mått. /... /

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonetterna till Orfeus II:XIII


English, German.

Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats by Eli Levén

Need to think about this for a while.