iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 7h

Unlean against our hearts. Kay Ryan

BLANDEUR

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

--KAY RYAN

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 15h

Transcription of the postcard Seamus Heaney dashed off to Ted Hughes shortly after learning he'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Literary friendships like these are everything.

To Ted Hughes
7 October 1995
PC BL
[Postmarked 'Baile Átha Cliath' (Dublin) '17 October']

Was telephoning on Friday evening, immediately after I heard the news. Wanted to say how much you were on my mind and how deep
the sense of gratitude takes hold – for all that you have done to help me and the effort. Seamus

PS En route from Athens.
PPS Forgot to post this. Your letter a fort for the soul. S.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 15h

Drop a film you saw on a first date. Still slaps.

Lobby card for John Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985)

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Anne Carson's "Short Talk on Gertrude Stein About 9:30" as it appeared in Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (2005)

Anne Carson

Short Talk On Gertrude
Stein About 9:30

How curious. I had no idea! Today has
ended.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Reminded, today, of this poem by Thomas Lux

Plague Victims Catapulted over Walls into Besieged City

Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way turn like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy's elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did
on earth.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You must confront things as they truly are Richard Wilbur

AT MOORDITCH

"Now," said the voice of lock and window-bar,
"You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality."

"Things have," I said, "a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book."

"Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,"
Said the sad hallways, "you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”

"This cannot be the world," I said. "Nor will it,
Till the heart's crayon spangle and fulfill it."

--RICHARD WILBUR

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Don't you see / It's all we can do? John Ashbery

JOHN ASHBERY

RAIN MOVING IN

The blackboard is erased in the attic
And the wind turns up the light of the stars,
Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.
And if somewhere on this great planet
The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,
It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one
Will be better for it, but things can't get any worse.
Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step
Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see
It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires
Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set
And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living
Conspires with it, now that this is our home:
A place to be from, and have people ask about.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Winter is coming, folks W.S. Merwin, born on this day in 1927

W. S. Merwin
DUSK IN WINTER

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

i stand up / through your destruction / i stand up Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton

MISS ROSIE

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Again and again the leaves / enact their beauty Marianne Boruch

Over the Twilight Street

Fall. And the boys are cold, without jackets the football their milkweed pod
bursting over the twilight street. They jump and release themselves, crying
like birds. Hours from the morning fog
the air is chilled good water
taken from a stream
with a cupped hand. They can barely keep themselves inside their bodies, vivid as light
through leaves, though now the leaves
have their own lifetime to consider
pressing back
into trance: a red brilliance
which listens for no one, an iridescence too complete to translate. I bike by them the football spinning above me,
a blurred planet. Boys who will be men, boys who will be taken by surprise by failure. Again and again the leaves enact their beauty.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?" The sign on the wall in the Time Safari office at the end of Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952)

TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

you hear the word loaded / and a sensory constellation / is lit The Thomas Lux poem I keep coming back to

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard.
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice.
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally--some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirrr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And "barn" is only a noun--no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.

--THOMAS LUX

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky Anne Carson

FATHER'S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face--
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

A poem for the equinox by Elizabeth Bishop as it first appeared in The New Yorker 70 years ago this month. This one hits a little different if you've spent time in Bishop's childhood home.

SESTINA

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to a grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the heartless almanac
on its string. Like a bird, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know, says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

-ELIZABETH BISHOP

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Very kind of you to say, Sarah. Any "deep artfulness," if it's there at all, has been worked on over a lifetime. The "simple utterance," I believe, is culturally genetic, and a product of my upbringing. Seamus Heaney discusses it here in his preface to Beowulf.

Without some melody sensed or
promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the trans- lator's right-of-way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father's, people whom I had once described in a poem as "big voiced Scullions."
I called them "big voiced" because when the men of the family spoke, the words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf. A simple sentence such as "We cut the corn to-day" took on immense dignity when one of the Scullions spoke it. They had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The epigraph to Kim Addonizio's Now We're Getting Somewhere (2021)

Everybody knows the captain lied.

-- Leonard Cohen

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A Poem from my 2016 collection Not Even Laughter featuring Leonard Cohen, who was born on this day in 1934.

Music for Airports

Up late drinking Polish lager, pulling records
out of Mylar sleeves, stoned on medical sativa,
cuing tracks by Johnny Cash, The Fall, and Nico

on your second-hand Technics. While the D3s kicked
out Jackson, Pay your Rates, The End, and English
Scheme, you chain-smoked Dunhills -- browsed.

the plywood shelves for doubles, poked through
Sealtest crates. One Sunday two years later,
searching listlessly for Astral Weeks, I find the pile

of ring worn albums that you gave to me to keep--
Hot Buttered Soul, a James Last import, Space Age
percussion suites for hi-fis, Brian Eno's landmark

foray into soundscapes, its water-damaged cover
stained and wrinkled -- the disc inside like Leonard
Cohen's shy one -- unplayed and still pristine.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Why do you worry so, / when none of us is spared? Jill Bialosky

ANOTHER LOSS TO STOP FOR

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,

to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

--JILL BIALOSKY

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Simon Armitage's boy wonder throwing shade to close out Batman Day

Kid

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order to grow up, then let me loose to wander leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather, in the gutter... well, I turned the corner. Now I've scotched that 'he was like a father to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover on that 'he was like an elder brother' story, let the cat out on that caper
with the married woman, how you took her downtown on expenses in the motor. Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker! Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover, I'm not playing ball boy any longer Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper; now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older. Batman, it makes a marvellous picture: you without a shadow, stewing over chicken giblets in the pressure cooker, next to nothing in the walk-in larder, punching the palm of your hand all winter, you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

070

phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Reminded, today, of the poem Robert Frost recited at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration

THE GIFT OUTRIGHT
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

So much joy in this wordplay masterclass by Thomas Lux

A SMALL TIN PARROT PIN

Next to the tiny bladeless windmill
of a saltshaker
on the black tablecloth
is my small tin parrot pin
bought from a bin,
75¢, cheap, but not pure tin--an alloy,
some plastic toy tin?
The actual pin, the pin that pins the pin,
will fall off soon,
and thus the parrot,
if I wear it, which I will,
on my lapel. I'll look down
and it'll be gone.
Let it be found by a child,
or someone sad, eyes
on the sidewalk, or what a prize
it would be for a packrat's nest.
My parrot's paint
is vivid: his head's red, bright yellow of breast
and belly, a stripe of green,
then purple, a soft
creamy purple, then bright--you know
the color--parrot-green
wing feathers. Tomorrow I think
I'll wear it on my blue shirt.
Tonight, someone whom I love
sleeps in the next room,
the room next to the room with the black tablecloth,
the saltshaker, the parrot pin.
She was very sleepy
and less impressed than I
with my parrot
with whom, with which
I am very pleased.

-- Thomas Lux

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Raymond Carver with a word to the wise

Loafing

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw --
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I've set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

turn your face again / toward me Frank Bidart

THE YOKE

don't worry
I know you're dead
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
see
upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke
don't worry
I know you're dead
but tonight
turn your face again

-FRANK BIDART

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I knew that we / were in training for a strange / future Bruce Taylor

Moon Town

Life is short, but afternoons are long.
Adrift in the vastness of
a tuesday, I used to put my cheek
up to the perforated hardboard
behind the TV to feel its heat,
looking in at the red vitals
of our modernity, and I knew that we
were in training for a strange
future, for lives filled with
dial gauges and horseshoe magnets,
moon towns and mechanical pets.
And it has been strange,
but one thing has never changed, I still
look into the future
closely inspecting the days left,
staring at them until they grow transparent,
like the blades of a fan.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Remember / me? Remember me / in any case. John Ashbery

WITHIN THE HOUR

The tea is too hot.
The curtain in the window blew around.
Rind rotting on brown chairs.
In the valley of bartenders the one-eyed stooge is king.

What I'm doing now is write.
That's the real stuff.
It doesn't work!
I got a card from him yesterday I could ask Dick.

What is the lively approach?
Your mini body coming unto me, unshelled
as pavanes in savanes no one undertakes
not without a woofing in the chest-o-ciser.

Two strokes and it's gone.
You owed the fresh kind.
Why yes. Remember
me? Remember me
in any case.

-JOHN ASHBERY

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

but what sort of thing is poetry? Wislawa Szymborska

SOME LIKE POETRY

Some-
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority. Not counting school, where one must,
and poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like-
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry-
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

-WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

(Translated, from the Polish, by Joanna Trzeciak.)

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Keep coming back to this D.H. Lawrence poem

D. H. Lawrence
THE WHITE HORSE

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

if it wasn't love I don't / know what it was Nikki Giovanni

LOVE IN PLACE

I really don't remember falling in love all that much
I remember wanting to bake corn bread and boil a ham and I certainly remember making lemon pie and when I used to smoke I stopped in the middle of my day to contemplate
I know I must have fallen in love once because I quit biting my cuticles and my hair is gray and that must indicate something and I all of a sudden had a deeper appreciation for Billie Holiday and Billy Strayhorn so if it wasn't love I don't know what it was
I see the old photographs and I am smiling and I'm sure quite happy but what I mostly see is me
through your eyes
and I am still young and slim and very much committed to the love we still have

-NIKKI GIOVANNI

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

A statement of condolence for Robert Lowell as it appeared in the pages of The Partisan Review where so many of his finest poems were first published. Lowell passed away on this day in 1977.