Excerpts of excellence

[Cormac]

I think some people need to look up the word "excerpt".

There is a thread for poems here.

Besides which, there are other interpretations of the topic. For example, one could view an entire body of work as a thing of excellence, and therefore a poem or group of poems from that body would be an excerpt...












...I'll get my coat.

[orpheus]

Samuel Beckett

Fizzle 3
Afar a bird



Ruinstrewn land, he has trodden it all
night long, I gave up, hugging the hedges,
between road and ditch, on the scant grass,
little slow steps, no sound, stopping ever and
again, every ten steps say, little wary steps, to
catch his breath, then listen, ruinstrewn land, I
gave up before birth, it is not possible other-
wise, but birth there had to be, it was he, I was
inside, now he stops again, for the hundredth
time that night say, that gives the distance
one, it's the last, hunched over his stick, I'm
inside, it was he who wailed, he who saw the
light, I didn't wail, I didn't see the light, one on
top of the other the hands weigh on the stick,
the head weighs on the hands, he has caught
his breath, he can listen now, the trunk
horizontal, the legs asprawl, sagging at the
knees, same old coat, the stiffened tails stick
up behind, day dawns, he has only to raise his
eyes, open his eyes, raise his eyes, he merges
in the hedge, afar a bird, a moment past he
grasps and is fled, it was he had a life, I didn't
have a life, a life not worth having, because of
me, it's impossible I should have a mind and I
have one, someone divines me, divines us,
that's what he's come to, come to in the end, I
see him in my mind, there divining us, hands
and head a little heap, the hours pass, he is
still, he seeks a voice for me, it's impossible I
should have a voice and I have none, he'll find
one for me, ill beseeming me, it will meet the
need, his need, but no more of him, that
image, the little heap of hands and head, the
trunk horizontal, the jutting elbows, the eyes
closed and the face rigid listening, the eyes
hidden and the whole face hidden, that image
and no more, never changing, ruinstrewn land,
night recedes, he is fled, I'm inside, he'll do
himself to death, because of me, I'll live it with
him, I'll live his death, the end of his life and
then his death, step by step, in the present,
how he'll go about it, it's impossible I should
know, I'll know, step by step, it's he will die, I
won't die, there will be nothing of him left but
bones, I'll be inside, nothing but a little grit, I'll
be inside, it is not possible otherwise,
ruinstrewn land, he is fled through the hedge,
no more stopping now, he will never say I,
because of me, he won't speak to anyone, no
one will speak to him, he won't speak to
himself, there is nothing left in his head, I'll
feed it all it needs, all it needs to end, to say I
no more, to open its mouth no more, confu-
sion of memory and lament, of loved ones and
impossible youth, clutching the stick in the
middle he stumbles bowed over the fields, a
life of my own I tried, in vain, never any but
his, worth nothing, because of me, he said it
wasn't one, it was, still is, the same, I'm still
inside, the same, I'll put faces in his head,
names, places, churn them all up together, all
he needs to end, phantoms to flee, last phan-
toms to flee and to pursue, he'll confuse his
mother with whores, his father with a road-
man named Balfe, I'll feed him an old curdog,
a mangy old curdog, that he may love again, lose again,
ruinstrewn land, little panic steps

[apophenia]

A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers,
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman's work, the solstice nearing,
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

— Adrienne Rich, concluding stanza of Toward The Solstice

(The Dream Of A Common Language, 1977)




"You know what we need? We need some drinks. A lot of drinks."
— Dogma (Bethany)

[apophenia]

Condemning the Moon god Nanna

As for me, my Nanna ignores me.
He has taken me to destruction,
to the alleys of murder.
Ashimbabbar has not judged me wrong.
If he had, what do I care?
If he had, what do I care!
I am Enheduanna.
I was triumphant, glorious,
but he drove me from my sanctuary.
He made me escape like a swallow
from the window.

My life is in flames.
He made me walk through the brambles
on the mountain.
He stripped me of the crown correct
for a high priestess.
He gave me a dagger and a sword,
and said:
"Turn them against your own body.
They are made for you."


— Enheduanna, Akkadian princess and High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna, circa. 2285-2250 BCE

[Lion IRC]

Henry V - The Bard

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow (enough)
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

(leading to)

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
This piece, to me, summarises the shocking contraposition of emotions that Shakespeare's writing so brillianty merged.
Good/bad, weak/strong, fear/bravery, masculine/feminine, purpose/futility, to live or not to live.

Lion (IRC)

There are some gutless wonders around.

[apophenia]

Casabianca

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but him had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.

The flames rolled on -- he would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

— Excerpt, Felicia Dorothea Hemans

[charlou]

I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco ..

I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on the absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all or nothing, at once cause and effect. But I realised that to neglect the Pendulum that hung from the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becoming drunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source.

[Feck]

Casabianca (by Spike Milligan )
The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled -
Twit.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

The boy stood on the burning deck his arse against the mast.
He didn't budge a bloody inch when Lozzer came cruising past.
But Lozzer, being a sly fucker, tossed the lad a fritter.
As he bent down to pick it up, Bang! Six inches up the shitter!

[Audley Strange]

"Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural."

Judge Holden. "Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West." Cormac McCarthy.

[orpheus]

Tu se' omai al purgatorio giunto:
vedi là il balzo che 'l chiude dintorno;
vedi l'entrata là 've par digiunto.

You have already come to Purgatory:
see there the rampart wall enclosing it;
see, where that wall is breached, the point of entry. 

Purgatorio IX, 49-51 
Translation Allen Mandelbaum

[orpheus]

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Each stands alone on the heart of the earth
Transfixed by a ray of sunlight:
And it's suddenly evening

-Salvatore Quasimodo
(Translation mine)

[orpheus]

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."


― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

[orpheus]

"No symbols where none intended."

–Samuel Beckett, Watt

[orpheus]

"One assumes that the world simply is and is and is but it isn't, it is like music that we hear a moment at a time and put together in our heads. But this music, unlike other music, cannot be performed again."


—Russell Hoban, Pilgermann