Author: nakedcitiesjournal

Naked Cities Journal attempts to bring together a number of passions that have captivated me over a lifetime: a love of exploring the urban landscape and its extraordinarily diverse range of places and spaces; a love of journeys both internal and external; a love of keeping writer’s notebooks; and a love of Urban Studies an intellectual discipline – Marcus D. Niski
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Reading Derrida: memories of Roland Barthes #Derrida #Barthes — Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Although I have read an *awful* lot of books during my lifetime, there are many authors who are still a bit intimidating and whom I’m nervous of approaching; Roland Barthes was one of those, and although I love what I’ve read, he’s definitely not the easiest of reads. However, even scarier is Jacques Derrida; nevertheless, […]

Reading Derrida: memories of Roland Barthes #Derrida #Barthes — Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
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Totem Press, Yugen – Imamu Amiri Baraka — 1960s: Days of Rage

Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1959). Cover by Matsumi Kanemitsu. “On the same small offset press, and as an arm of his magazine Yugen, LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press imprint published thirteen pamphlets, beginning with Diane di Prima’s This Kind of Bird Flies Backward in 1958. The press also published work by Ron Loewinsohn (Watermelons, 1959), Michael […]

Totem Press, Yugen – Imamu Amiri Baraka — 1960s: Days of Rage
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E.E. Cummings — The Vale of Soul-Making

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
 
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
 
i smilingly
glide.  I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
 
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
 
(of solongs and,ashes)

— E.E. Cummings, ” [into the strenuous briefness],” 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press January 10, 1994) Originally published 1954.

E.E. Cummings — The Vale of Soul-Making

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William Ernest Henley

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1875) Published 1888.

William Ernest Henley — The Vale of Soul-Making