very, very involving & thoughtful. I just had a two-hour-long
discussion with an old friend about cognition & genes & poetry, I feel
like I'm reading these poems while high
KS
On 05/11/2007, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> CV
>
>
> In that decade, adding machines
> at the U.S. Department of Labor
> in San Francisco covered a third of one's desk;
> and, bored between totals,
> I would divide something
> by zero and listen
> to the endless grinding.
>
> In her spare time, Milly, surname forgotten,
> typed my novel, all five hundred pages.
> Immensely fat, diabetic
> (like me now), soft-spoken,
> she nevertheless stood up
> to our boss, officious and nasty,
> who had her own secret life.
>
> Otherwise the job involved
> continually updating
> binders full of directives
> for DOL programs
> that multiplied under Nixon:
> ill-designed, underfunded,
> intentionally (it was obvious) self-defeating.
>
> When I moved to Los Angeles, one
> of my quasi-imaginary,
> wise, sardonic informants said,
> "In this town there are wannabes and hasbeens."
> "What if a wannabe," I asked,
> "spends his entire life wanting?"
> "He becomes an *extreme hasbeen."
>
>
>
>
> The Evolved
>
>
> The smile of a cultist,
> or an addict lying in a doorway;
> the virtual enthusiasm, world without end,
> of an arch-geek … One imagines
>
> something *less than ourselves. Or symbols:
> a winged sphinx,
> an inflexible golden circle,
> a light subtly dancing
>
> in the void. But what if you knew
> they were on the other side
> of a wall (every wall
> is a door, said Emerson, horribly),
>
> slumming a million years
> downscale – would you flee?
> What if they had no
> insignia? Only
>
> the glance that dissects
> instantaneously
> without interest or disgust,
> a kind of dreamy pity for you
>
> cowering on this side of the wall.
>
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