Goodbye – Robert Creeley RIP+Vincent & Nina

(This sad news came from Ron Silliman’s blog. More here, and here.)

Black Mountain poet fired by an elemental energy (from the Guardian)

Goodbye by Robert Creeley

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water

might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
“Born very young into a world
already very old…”
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.
(Poem is from here).

Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, The Netherlands on 30 March 1853, (from here.)
Read his Letters on his birthday.

Read this article today. Olivier Assayas said, “Maggie is a mystery,” he says, finally. “I don’t know if I ever fully understood her. I thought I did, but she’s even more of a mystery to herself.”
A parting gift for Maggie (from here.)

Another (the) Long Goobye took place in Arizona.
Funny Long Face says goodbye to Nina this morning.