Karen MacCormack
Machicolated Conversations 1

“With the invention of the alphabet began that outburst of epics and lyrics and prophecies and apologues and histories which continues to this day, with less decline of energy and quality than any of the other arts have suffered, excepting perhaps music, so what would be the poetic equivalent to “a turban twenty yards long and one yard broad of Dacca muslin (that could be) pulled through a finger ring”?”

“Memory combines with the act of remembering (a present tense indeed) with the reconstruction of what becomes present again and it is in this state of evocation that poetry is aloud.”
“To take apart the concept of time and to register this experience in and of itself as not an end or a beginning but as when combines with how . . . thus the jongleur, among other functions now regarded as the business of the press, performed that of writing obituary notices.”

“Is there a poetic analogy to this — perhaps the intimation of new meaning in certain sound poetries wherein words themselves are suggested but not present in their normative sense? — a curious feature of the Hispano-Moresque work is the imitation of gold by using strips of gilded parchment round silk thread.”

“To open the dictionary at random to the word stress so apart from bergmehl we might approach the 1,164 difference as a.m. and p.m. but linguistic unity cannot be secured by learned academies, even in our days; current usage changes continually, and if there is no such conservative influence as that exerted by print and a public dependent upon print, linguistic change proceeds apace and unregulated, except by the vacillations of fashion.”

“The concept of beyond applies to both distance and time to remember to forget to dwell upon leaving locale’s in senses differing directions gravity’s which way is up? . . . the well is another kind of horizon, more like a window to the centre of the earth: a hidden horizon, not horizontal, but vertical, on the axis of vertigo, falling.”

“The geometric designs in these (Scandinavian tapestries) are universal patterns found also in Icelandic, Peruvian, Beduin and other Oriental textiles, taking into account the admonishment (made in old age): ‘Don’t listen to what I say . . . listen to what I mean’, indicates how we can find ourselves at odds with langwidge.”

“Space coalesces with time-to-our-knowledge, but what informs potential other-dimensions in relation to both (and ‘more’) each moment’s simultaneous subtraction from time yet addition to one’s experience is separate from any other instances, with the eventual exception of demise.”
“The tent nomads carry with them is part of that walking; it never interrupts space, as a house does.”

“Life is too crowded in these days for work of this kind, but it is wonderful to imagine the carpet made from this wool — an imprisoned sunset that would be a joy as long as the threads of the fabric held together the perception that there are decreasing units of time in a 24-hour day colliding with the sense that the amount of information claiming attention increases exponentially.”
“Beam precedes belle yet rings remark both times if a fraction’s space of then a house can still be another thing: part of one’s raiment, the outermost garment, the one manifested to the largest public and by which the world that knows one least will think it knows one best.”