The
Front Door I - Liner
Notes
By Dan Jeremy Brooks
(11/29/9212:59 a.m.)
For Mark "The Smutz" Smotzer
“The shapes arise!
Shapes of doors giving many exits and entrances,
The door passing the dissever’d friend flush’d and in haste,
The door that admits good news and bad news,
The door whence the son left home confident and puff’d up,
The door he enter’d again from a long and scandalous absence, diseas’d,
broken down, without innocence, without means.”
- Walt Whitman, “Song of the Broad-Axe” (1876)
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“Jesus once of humble birth
Now in glory comes to Earth
Once he suffered grief and pain
Now he comes on Earth to reign.
Once a meek and lowly lamb
Now The Lord, the great “I Am”
Once upon the cross He bowed
Now his chariot is the cloud.
Once He groaned in blood and tears
Now in glory He appears
Once rejected by his own
Now their King he shall be known.”
- Parley Pratt, “Jesus Once of Humble Birth” (?)
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“A
couple of days ago Delmore Schwartz died from a heat-attack . . . just
outside his room in a cheap New York hotel alone,
out of touch, for a year, a shadow, a rumor seen here and there, gone
underground, after he vanished and hid from Syracuse University, angry
that he hadn’t been given tenure. Maybe the heat killed him . . . but
really his end was in the cards for long, too much drinking, paranoia
that cut him off from jobs, and even friends. . . . obsessed, a much better
mind, but one already chasing the dust it
was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider no
hurry, no motion, Delmore’s voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive,
pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage too
much, too much for us! Nothing haunts me more than breaking with friends.
I used to think he was the only one I broke with.”
- Robert Lowell, “Letter to Elizabeth Bishop” (7/16/66) |