September 24, 2013
***************
Frightening dreams are
silenced only by the blue
of Man’s suffering
***************
If you hear a voice
within you, disregard it
with your inmost strength
***************
If you don’t paint the
stars, your soul is forsaken,
a wisp of warm smoke
***************
I am still far from
God, lost, a churchwarden in
the dirtiest hut
***************
Life is a yellow
storm on an orange sea—a
fantasy of love
***************
My heart is the slave
of conscience without courage—
small deeds, small mistakes
***************
Religion is a
terrible certainty of
high-minded reason
***************
My faith is a poor
fisherman who is always
remaining ashore
***************
Fallibility
and discouragement fire the
imagination
***************
Tags: art, haiku, painting, poetry, quote, Starry Night
Posted in Vincent van Gogh | Comments Off on Vincent van Gogh
August 22, 2013
***************
The news is abused—
cold code strained through inverted
subjectivity
***************
Assassination
is the struggle to find words
that describe genius
***************
The sufficiency
of average-sized eyes is
a harrowing joke
***************
Florida is an
agony of moribund
class repetition
***************
Plagiarism is the
spectacle emanating
from silent mourning
***************
A soft text wrapped in
shock iconizes the breasts
of cultural whim
***************
The gargantuan
problem of discourse is the
horror of language
***************
Conceptualism:
Minimalism plus Michael
Jackson’s memories
***************
[Goldsmith is virtually unrepresented on quote sites. All text pooled from his interview with Christopher Higgs in the Paris Review, 2013]
Tags: conceptual writing, haiku, poetry, quote
Posted in Kenneth Goldsmith | Comments Off on Kenneth Goldsmith #2
July 27, 2013
***************
Brion Gysin is
the horizontal axis
of the avant-garde
***************
Concrete poetry’s
shelf life is about a week—
the same as gossip
***************
The New York Times is
Vogue with rabbinical text
and raw editing
***************
Writing is fifty
years behind fashion, but it’s
gorgeously simple
***************
Cooperative
mimesis is the flatness
of community
***************
The parameters
of the abstract canon are
ennui’s storage bins
***************
The normative speech
of idiosyncratic
art is radiance
***************
Cage, Ginsberg, Warhol
and Whitman: grubby merchants
all, plain and greedy
***************
[Goldsmith is virtually unrepresented on quote sites. All text pooled from his interview with Marjorie Perloff in Jacket magazine, 2003]
Tags: conceptual writing, haiku, poetry, quote
Posted in Kenneth Goldsmith | Comments Off on Kenneth Goldsmith #1
July 26, 2013
Paranoid Replication #32 (Homage to John Coltrane)
Posted in John Coltrane | Comments Off on
July 26, 2013
![Paranoid Replication #31 (The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost) [Adapted from a detail of a photo by Anna Talpe]](https://haikurevelation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/christ-not-coltrane-replication.jpg?w=450&h=596)
Paranoid Replication #31 (The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost)
[Adapted from a detail of a photo by Anna Talpe]
Posted in John Coltrane | Comments Off on
June 16, 2013
***************
Love is a silver
mirror bursting in the fast
ocean of my heart
***************
The metronome of
time is an obsessive dream
of silent music
***************
This society
is a gallery show that
runs on pain money
***************
Art is permanent
even if nobody else
in this world sees it
***************
When controversy
is sacrificed to power,
culture can’t exist
***************
The peace and healing
of prophetic wisdom is
lost beyond sad air
***************
Vibrations flow from
the intelligent body—
walking is thinking
***************
Tags: haiku, poetry, quote
Posted in Yoko Ono | Comments Off on Yoko Ono
June 7, 2013
***************
The key to the new
art is within each atom
of pure suffering
***************
Survival is a
license to consume the oil
of eternal dreams
***************
Daily life is the
corpse of poetry murdered
by enduring love
***************
Revolution is
a mechanized cycle of
democratic rage
***************
The truth is knowledge
constrained by understanding
and necessity
***************
Philosophy is
starvation of the mind by
mortification
***************
The refusal of
banal pleasure insults your
productivity
***************
The slaughterhouse of
poverty sings with the drowned
mouth of advantage
***************
Tags: haiku, poetry, quote, situationist
Posted in Raoul Vaneigem | Comments Off on Raoul Vaneigem
May 14, 2013
***************
Every suicide
of a theologian is
a resurrection
***************
Patriotism is
the wax dog of cowardice
barking at your heart
***************
A man is himself
only so long as he’s not
intelligible
***************
The monogamous
relationship will never
assuage solitude
***************
After your death you
will be what you were before
music existed
***************
A man’s brain is an
idiot text, parasite
of his intellect
***************
Perversity is
a fascination with the
inexplicable
***************
Tags: haiku, philosophy, poetry, quote
Posted in Schopenhauer | Comments Off on Schopenhauer
April 4, 2013
***************
Radishes are all
we have. We have words, but they’re
unnecessary.
***************
Obliterate bliss.
Pulverize delirium.
Weep for butterflies.
***************
There’s no cure for a
God who is no longer young,
reduced to dying
***************
Reason is tripe. Love
is tripe. Death is tripe. But they’re
not all the same tripe.
***************
Regret nothing but
hideous calculations
and the shine of boots
***************
Time is a vulgar
sonata, idle discourse
for the hunted deaf
***************
The sun looked upon
nothingness; silent gleam of
the world’s spangled bones
***************
Tags: Godot, haiku, poetry, quote
Posted in Samuel Beckett | Comments Off on Samuel Beckett
March 8, 2013
***************
Boredom is the dull
reverse side of every Right-
wing paranoid lie
***************
The best thing about
religion is heresy
in a baroque church
***************
Surrealism is
sadomasochism without
the pornography
***************
Marx is sexier
than bourgeois social life; he’s
an erotic dream
***************
Cogito, ergo
something like communism is
human salvation
***************
American love
is a philistine excess
of sensory dread
***************
Contemporary
art is all-out war—culture’s
lunatic death mask
***************
Tags: against interpretation, haiku, poetry, quote
Posted in Susan Sontag | Comments Off on Susan Sontag
February 23, 2013
***************
Luxury is the
natural contentment with
artificial things
***************
I am in friendly
harmony with evil: My
mother is for sale
***************
There is only one
good, but it is not in the
field of my knowledge
***************
Having the fewest
wants, I am nearest to the
poverty of God
***************
Old age is wretched;
I’ve had as much as a man
can bear and then some
***************
Beauty infects the
soul with the desire for gold
and wise ignorance
***************
Justice and virtue
are false words; follow not where
they aspire to lead
***************
Tags: haiku, hemlock, philosophy, poetry, quote
Posted in Socrates (via Plato et al.) | Comments Off on Socrates (via Plato et al.)
February 8, 2013
***************
The proper function
of God is to prolong our
suffering. That’s it.
***************
Every atom of
me is a traitor to my
class and my mother
***************
I’m hungry for the
magnificent glow of your
loins to spill wet eggs
***************
Memories are the
ashes of ecstasy, the
dust of forgiveness
***************
Nature violates
my sanity; it eats at
my inspiration
***************
Moonlight is a sheet
of flame that will burst the world
like a meteor
***************
Cash is the bone and
fame is the dog; go after
that dog with a club
***************
The lavish hand of
charity is limitless . . .
Father the unborn!
***************
Tags: haiku, iron heel, poetry, quote
Posted in Jack London | Comments Off on Jack London
January 21, 2013
***************
He alone is free
who lives with the confusion
of natural sin
***************
True virtue is life
under the direction of
the divine absurd
***************
Whatsoe’er is, is
in music. Without music
there is only God
***************
As you go to war,
be abject, indignant and
love deformity
***************
Salvation is the
greatest pride, far beyond man’s
self-complacency
***************
We feel and know that
happiness is a nuisance;
we strive not to laugh
***************
By common consent,
a humble ignorance is
our greatest desire
***************
Tags: haiku, panpsychism, philosophy, poetry, quote
Posted in Spinoza | Comments Off on Spinoza
January 9, 2013
***************
A man is rich in
proportion to the number
of things he regrets
***************
It is unwise to
keep one’s feet on a level
with eternity
***************
A government that
imprisons unjustly is
every government
***************
I stand in awe of
the sparrow, who builds temples
in the air of time
***************
The remedy for
love is wisdom, for which there
is no remedy
***************
Give me the water
of infinite truth. And if
you can’t, I’ll drink faith
***************
Public opinion
is the cheapest pleasure found
in a vacuum
***************
Take my pity and
give me money—I am the
sage of poverty
***************
The mass of men lead
anxious lives, lost in the hard
fruit of the moment
***************
You get more nurture
from a trout than you do from
this society
***************
Go confidently
in the direction of your
fate! And take a dog
***************
Beware of all things
whose success requires God, guns
and morality
***************
Tags: civil disobedience, haiku, poetry, quote, Walden
Posted in Henry David Thoreau | Comments Off on Henry David Thoreau
December 24, 2012
***************
The Muses are ten,
the Graces are four, but my
one tomb I adore
***************
The underworld is
a lie, the resurrection
a great evil sleep
***************
How strange is the lot
of great books! Without deeper
reflection, they die
***************
I drink from every
well, though I loathe Venus more
than Pluto himself
***************
Nightingales claw at
the world, their bitter tears the
perfumed common dust
***************
The laughter of life
is brief; it shines with wine but
Death is a fair thief
***************
I wept for the wit
of holy poetry . . . the
sun ran with darkness
***************
Tags: haiku, Library of Alexandria, poetry, quote
Posted in Callimachus | Comments Off on Callimachus
December 3, 2012
***************
God was Woman’s first
mistake; then Man; then Love; then
Christianity
***************
You have your way, I
have my way. Your way is fine
for a lunatic
***************
That which does not kill
me does not exist. Death is
the faith of all life
***************
If you gaze into
the abyss of marriage it
will destroy your soul
***************
Without egoism,
music would be a mistake
and art would be blind
***************
All things are subject
to the interpretation
of an idiot
***************
To live is to know
that suffering does not prove
anything at all
***************
Tags: Übermensch, haiku, Overman, philosophy, poetry, quote
Posted in Nietzsche | Comments Off on Nietzsche
![Paranoid Replication #31 (The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost) [Adapted from a detail of a photo by Anna Talpe]](https://haikurevelation.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/christ-not-coltrane-replication.jpg?w=450)
The Book of Haiku Revelation 