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                                                […] Will I ever
stop wanting more than what I’ve already got, I used to wonder,
not realizing yet that’s all ambition is, finally; I thought
humility would be a smaller thing, a quieter
thing, it seems I was wrong about that, too. I can’t
decide if it’s just my being so much older now, or if it’s
always been true, that winter foliage
is the prettiest foliage.

Carl Phillips, “Anywhere Like Peace”, in Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020

[P]eople just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?”

Jason Stanley, in Al Letson, “I Study Fascism. I’ve Already Fled America.”

Since he’d first arrived in New York, [Jack] Whitten had haunted the city’s nightclubs in pursuit of jazz, which Mary [Staikos] recalled as “the background music” of their lives. He heard Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis at the old Five Spot and was friends with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders, among other musicians. Whitten had sold his own tenor sax by 1963, deciding instead to embody in visual form his understanding of jazz’s musical structure—one of high-driving abstraction that opens into almost unfathomable freedom. One moment that reverberated for him for decades was a conversation with John Coltrane, who described his compositions as a “wave.” Whitten translated these “sheets of sound” into Light Sheet I (1969), a large unstretched canvas in which enormous silk-screened gestures create diaphanous veils of yellow, pink, purple, and gray over nested squares.

At that time New York’s reigning god of painting, Willem de Kooning, in his sixties and at the height of his power, was producing a body of work that combined muscular action and aching sensitivity in agile yellows, pinks, grays, and blues. Without seeming to refer to anything but paint itself, he could conjure the transitory effects of the landscape, of sunlight on water or sand, of living bodies and sensate flesh, or the palette and contours of Raphael or Titian—not just the look but the feel of them—effects that adamantly remained just paint on a flat ground. Regardless of the labor involved, de Kooning wanted these works to appear effortlessly fast, like “a wind blowing across the surface.” They remain to this day the highest achievement in gestural abstract painting.

Jarrett Earnest, “‘I Am the Heir to Delacroix’”

“So I have brought inside my pouch,
a little draft of a Hokusai crane.”

Max got a tattoo after every surgery. He wanted to make something beautiful out of something painful. They were all birds, modeled after different artists. One was a crane, inscribed on his head, inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai. In his tattoo parlor play, Max wrote these stage directions.

The tattoo artist finishes, and picks the boy up, very gently like an angel helping another angel. She offers him a compact mirror gently like an angel offering a compact mirror to another angel. He smiles and begins to check it out.

Then the boy says: “It’s dope. I really love it in this light.”

Sarah Ruhl, in Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo, Letters from Max

There is a heavily chandeliered
gas station in California, and if
you wonder if the night manager
has any new obsessions lately,

one is positioning the tradeoff
between flexibility and strength
as a modern development, and
another is considering talk of

weather as a way of making
mood public in other places (like
we use traffic). Also, a closed
expansion of the octave range.

And then a joke I won’t share
now because it only works
if you agree the idea of god is
hilarious. Mine: care as control,

moth wrestling as pageantry,
the intricacy of wiring the moon
would require if we lit it
ourselves, and scheduling

space to mourn a migraine as
it ends—the calm—the ceiling far,
and jeweled, and bright, brighter

Cindy Juyoung Ok, “Sunset, Glory”, in Ward Toward

To know where we came from—and what we came through—doesn’t have to mean we know any more clearly where we are, except not there, anymore. The forest begins where civilization ends, so I’d been told. Past here be monsters. Past the meadow; past harvest. Past daylight into forest light—for it’s never all darkness, beneath the trees, not even at night, not even on a moonless night. Song travels differently in forest light. Everything’s different.

That the forest itself contains no apology doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. Or I’m not sorry. Or I didn’t hurt you.

Toward the end of Marilyn Nelson’s poem “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods,” the grandfather asks the trees a question and “They answer / with voices like wind / blowing away from him.” That’s one way of putting it, for their voices can sound like wind. What matters more, I think, is that in the language of trees there’s no grammatical mood: questions, statements, commands—it’s all song, stripped of anything like judgment, intention, or need. This makes translation especially difficult. Though I know many parts of their songs, I’ve only three by heart: “Yes, you can tell me anything,” and “No, even we can’t help you,” and “If I were you, I’d be the lostest, lostest boy I know.”

Carl Phillips, “Among the Trees”, in Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020

The campaigns of Palestine Action have involved disabling the factory in the Wirral that produces components for the F-35 fighter jets used to bomb Gaza, dismantling UAVs at a Runcorn drone factory and occupying facilities owned by Elbit Systems, which produces 85 per cent of the IDF’s land vehicles. In doing so, Palestine Action has drawn attention to the war—and to the mounting death toll—as well as to the UK’s role in the weapons industry that sustains it.

The proscription of Palestine Action means that the group can no longer make such protests, or any protests at all. Criminal laws exist that can and have been brought against these actions. But it is this very course of justice that the proscription aims to impede. In a number of similar cases, activists who have disarmed weapons systems have been acquitted by juries because their actions were aimed at preventing war crimes. Although laws around such a defence have been tightened, juries can still acquit on the basis of jury nullification, where an acquittal is determined to be in the interests of justice as a matter of conscience. In 1996, the Ploughshares Four, a group of women who broke into an aerodrome to vandalise a BAE Hawk aircraft due to be exported to East Timor, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They had argued that they were using reasonable force to prevent BAE Systems from complicity in the East Timor genocide. In 2007, two members of the Fairford Five, a group who broke into RAF Fairford in 2003 to damage equipment used to support B-52 bombers headed for Iraq, were acquitted by a jury on the same basis. In 2022, five Palestine Action activists were acquitted by a jury following a demonstration during which they sprayed red paint on the headquarters of Elbit Systems. Keir Starmer is aware of this legal anomaly: as a human rights barrister, he defended Josh Richards, a member of the Fairford Five who was acquitted when a jury failed to reach a verdict. Such an outcome is exactly what the government is trying to avoid. In taking Palestine Action activists to court on charges of criminal damage, they risk exposing the chasm between government policy and public opinion. It is not terror the government fears, but embarrassment.

Huw Lemmey, “Who’s Afraid of Palestine Action?”

Yesterday, while looking for
the owl, I met a gelding. The
horse was so still that it must
have been time. I almost
missed it because I didn’t

know I could see time. Time
is the only thing that doesn’t
move when it moves. I stood
at the fence, half hoping the
horse would come over, half

hoping I was the horse. I made
noises with my feet. The horse
turned its head to me. What are
days for for? / Days are where we
live. / … They are to be happy

in: / Where can we live but
days? wrote Larkin. My day
was this horse. This horse is all
my days, with its brusies, tears,
thin overworked body. I pay

all my debts to this horse.
This horse is also all the hours
of my life that are unlived.
It is all human suffering at
once. The horse knows this

and doesn’t move, doesn’t
come near me because
suffering cannot be touched.
At the courthouse, a woman
saw me looking up at a tree.

No owls today, she said. Two
live up there. This whole time I
had only been looking for one.
One is my life and the other is
what it could have been.

Victoria Chang, “Marfa, Texas”, in The Trees Witness Everything