Dada artist, refugee, master of the spicileging arts. Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948.)


Ice Clocks



Boil clocks boil breathe ice

Ember crumbles ember simmer ice

Clocks cook clocks ice simmer ember

Clocks cook ice

Mimosa, orange, aphrodite, tulip flora, aphrodite.

I drift through life a dead fish.




Trans.Jerome Rothenberg....

When George Mackay Brown had his first collection The Storm published by the Orkney Press in 1954. Edwin Muir wrote in the forward: "Grace is what I find in these poems."



Weather Bestiary



The unicorn melts through his prism. Sodden hooves
Have deluged the corn with light.


A fisherman wets his finger. The eyelash
Of the grey stallion flicks his blood with cold....

A strange exploration: Fridtjof Nansen took his ship Fram and froze her into the pack-ice in the Eastern Arctic Ocean, then waited for the drift to carry her towards the North Pole. Impatient with the slow speed and erratic character of the journey, after 18 months Nansen and a chosen companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship with a team of dogs and sledges and made for the pole. They did not reach it, but they achieved a record Farthest North latitude of 86°13.6'N before a long retreat over ice...

Reading work by Georg Trakl, published in the Austrian literary magazine Der Brenner, Wittgenstein said: “I do not understand his poetry, but its tone delights me. It is the tone of a man of real genius.” Wittgenstein reached out indirectly to Trakl in the summer of 1914, making a donation of 100,000 crowns to needy Austrian artists and asked Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, to oversee its distribution. Ficker requested that 20,000 of it be sent to Trakl. When Trakl went to withdraw the first...

Gertrude Stein noted, on meeting Edith Sitwell, that she possessed a most distinguished nose and she walked as if advancing and withdrawing at the same time. Her poems leave a similar impression:


When Cold December


When cold December
Froze to grisamber
The jangling bells on the sweet rose-trees--
Then fading slow
And furred is the snow
As the almond's sweet husk--
And smelling like musk.
The snow...