Reposted by John LattaDylan Brennan @dylanbrennan.bsky.social · 7hVoladores & fountain. Mexico City. 041
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8hThere’s a wry goofy numinosity—fervor ratcheted down a notch—in the “calling” of a line like “Dogwood calls the catbirds.” One senses the mischief in the earlier alignment of bee (in flower) with bean (in shell), the natural world become _like_ pasta e fagioli, mimicking an ordinary homemade thing. 130
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8hspecies name of the American hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana), another tree native to the Blue Ridge. A whole “radiant node” there: ch’ing ming, “right naming.” Gilfillan is a master of a certain laconic economy wherein seeing itself makes precise naming’s arrangements: “Black cherry calls the blue.” 120
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8hCastenea: genus name of the American chestnut, former mainstay of the Appalachian slopes; ruficapilla, literally “chestnut-crowned,” species name of the Nashville warbler (Oreothlypis ruficapilla), with its rarely-noted reddish-brown smudge of a cap; caroliniana—amongst other, commoner, pertinences— 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8hOut of Merrill Gilfillan’s wonderfully-titled and expansive _Three Roans in the Shallows, One of Them Blue_ (Flood Editions, 2024), “Blue Ridge: Streams Are Roaring”: 280
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 8hAmongst Peter Hujar’s contact sheets (still up at the Morgan Library), a few portraits, unidentified and undated, but undoubtedly of jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. 1140
Reposted by John Lattakimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 11/10/2026(thanks to Anthony Opal) 0105
Reposted by John LattaOrange County Review of Books @ocreviewofbooks.bsky.social · 20hHarold Bloom, step aside. 051
Reposted by John LattaElla Maillart @ellamaillart.bsky.social · 19h"The wideness of the horizon has to be inside us, cannot be anywhere but inside us, otherwise what we speak about is geographic distances." - Ella Maillart #EllaMaillart #Photography #Kyrgyzstan #Karakol 38713
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 10/10/2026It’s really an astonishing exercise in sheer stamina and bravado, if nothing else. Something like 15,280 uninterrupted lines. With gems like: “this earth like a flea on the back of some beast.” 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 10/10/2026Frank Stanford calls dragonflies “snake doctors.” I had to look it up. Apparently a regional thing. A folk belief that they stitched up wounds of injured snakes. 170
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 09/10/2026Out of Frank Stanford’s _The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You_ (1977). Summoning up justice, its lack (here, in the lynching of Sylvester the Black Angel: “they called him Mr. Petty Gouger / he said he was a dicty cat from way on back”), and the “nothing one man will not do to another.” 082
Reposted by John LattaGilbert White @gilbertwhite.bsky.social · 09/10/20261777: Beans & vetches are housed. 0194
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Evidence of the unending tumult between gussied up “verbal playfulness” (FO’H also mentions “technical glitter”) and the purported “achievement” of plain speech. 1101
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026“Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”—in the 1895 poem “Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe.” Eliot, in “Little Gidding” (1942): “our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe.” 280
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Reading rather aimlessly in the Donald Allen-edited Standing Still and Walking in New York (1975), Frank O’Hara’s (mostly) occasional “notes & essays.” I love how O’Hara, in a defense of Kenneth Koch’s verbal “vivacity and go,” mocks the import of T.S. Eliot’s somnolent borrowing of Mallarmé’s line— 1100
Reposted by John Lattakimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Arthur Dove / Rain, 1924 0214
Reposted by John LattaRabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Arthur Dove , Starry Heavens, 1924, Oil and Metallic paint, 47913
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026You’re right, Rachel. Is it likely that’s part of what allowed her to transcend the genre? I just like the no-holds-barred nature of Harrison’s claim. 010
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Out of Valeria Luiselli’s tender (and pleasingly Pliny-haunted) novel Beginning Middle End (2026), two lyrical and essayistic outbursts: 2132
Reposted by John Lattakimcarsons4.bsky.social @kimcarsons4.bsky.social · 07/10/2026One late afternoon last week. #photography 0101
Reposted by John LattaAndrew Russeth @russeth.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Untitled Charles Ray, 1991 0152
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Reminds me of novelist Jim Harrison’s remark, in a book review somewhere: “Country music is utterly without irony.” 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Just read Derf Backderf’s excellent (& well-researched) new graphic novel The Dissidents, mostly about repression of “The Masses” cartoonists. Got a whole new view of Woodrow Wilson, highly autocratic, contemptuous of civil rights, suppressor of dissent. 020
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 05/10/2026And I think of the bliss-stupor of writing itself, that bounteous continuum “ready to be all sorts of whats.” And its necessary diminishment of the world’s, well, rabidness, its snarling thereness. That provisional trancelike state of writing arrived at through itself: one writes oneself into it. 1130
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Looking for something or other, and finding a copied-out paragraph of William James’s 1905 essay called “The Thing and Its Relations,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912): 1140
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Thank you! I particularly love the mysterious rightness of the next line: ”We live in an old chaos of the sun . . .” 040
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Too (“gusto” recalls it), there’s Marianne Moore’s line out of a 12 November 1944 letter to Williams: “Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose . . .” 170
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 04/10/2026William Carlos Williams, out of “Wallace Stevens” (1956). Healthily grousing a little about “the contempt of the world” for “the difficult art of the poem”—and finding, in Stevens, an ally: 1110
Reposted by John Lattakimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 03/10/2026the northeast monsoon or Thulavarsham begins 1141
Reposted by John LattaMeropi ( Nancy Meropi Ypsilantis Dupree) @meropi5.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Looking into each other’s eyes 0111
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026A few preferred tidbits of / for Wallace Stevens (b. 2 October 1879). A few lines out of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” a pertinent and irascible remark made to Henry Church in a letter (1 June 1939), and some lines out of “The Poems of Our Climate”: 0162
Reposted by John LattaNico @brushesandnotes.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Silence is a flower, it opens up, dilates, extends its texture, can grow, mutate, return on its steps. I can watch other flowers grow and become what they are. ~ Etel Adnan 0132
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Wright notes, too, the existence of “It Wasn’t a Dream: It Was a Flood,” calling it “a 1974 Cocteau-toned film of Frank’s life.” Elliptical and enchanted, with a terrific soundtrack, put together by Irv Broughton. As Stanford says: “I put a lot of trust in dreams.”youtube.comIt WASN'T A DREAM: IT WAS A FLOODYouTube video by Frank Stanford 070
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026As C. D. Wright says in the preface: “He wrote: ‘I’ll just bleed so the stars will have something dark to shine in.’ What can you say to that.” 162
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026And ends, nearly four hundred pages thence, stuck in the same brute timelessness of revery: 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Reading, in little spasms of a few pages each, Frank Stanford’s “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You” (Lost Roads, 2000). It begins, seemingly in medias res: 1100
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Reading: Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026). Thek, c. 1969, in a postcard to a critic: “Isn’t it an artist’s job to constantly say goodbye to art?” Paul Thek, “Untitled (Five Vertical Red Lines),” acrylic, gesso on newspaper, c. 1981 0132
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Love it. We used to turn mousetraps into live traps by wiring a tin can with one end open to it, and wire mesh to the spring-loaded wire "flap." Good for catching mice and chipmunks. Once, I seem to recall, a flying squirrel. 130
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I don’t recall ever trying it out, but was always tempted by homemade stick-and-string box traps illustrated in old boys’ books of camping and woodcraft. Along with much else in those books. 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Found in a box of old letters a friend recently returned to me, the torn-off corner of a newspaper. Pretty certainly out of an Ithaca, N.Y. weekly called The Grapevine, a late-’seventies countercultural rag that sported bylines like “Swampfox” and “Canadian Bacon.” Me addressing the bigger topics. 1221
Reposted by John Lattakimdorman.bsky.social @kimdorman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026(last day of September ) At dusk, the blue-tailed bee-eaters catch dragonflies in mid-air. 0203
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 29/09/2026As weird as the Apollinaire painting. Thanks for that: I never saw it before. 110
John Latta @lattaj.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Alerted by Pat Nolan’s soulful “Smoking Poet” cut: today’s the anniversary of W. H. Auden’s death (d. 29 September 1973). I rather admire the chutzpah behind William Matthews’s “In Memory of W. H. Auden,” how it works (slantwise, at least) off Auden’s own “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” 2122
Reposted by John LattaPaulo da Fonseca @paulodafonseca.bsky.social · 29/09/2026John Foster. 9 years – Accidental Mysteries 0184
