R.M. Engelhardt's Blog: Burn Brightly, page 43
March 4, 2013
“What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aest...
“What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’ Aesthetic fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty. That is your real predicament, your real curse.”
~ Glen Duncan
March 3, 2013
WE WRITE BECAUSE WE BELIEVE THE HUMAN SPIRIT CANNOT BE...
WE WRITE BECAUSE WE BELIEVE THE HUMAN SPIRIT CANNOT BE
TAMED AND SHOULD NOT BE TRAINED.
~ Nikki Giovanni
March 2, 2013
The Quiet Theory of Influence
By Leo Babauta.
Most online marketing people will teach you how to use social media to reach a larger audience, how to use email lists and the scarcity principle and social proof, how to create authority, how to effectively convert pageviews into sales.
Most marketers, online or off, are full of it.
Converting visitors into buyers is a soul-less use of your creative energy. Reject it, out of hand.
I find more value in creating something of value. I find influence a better metric than sales or traffic or reader numbers.
And I’ve learned something that the screaming marketers will never tell you:instead of screaming, prefer quiet.
When everyone yells “Look at me!”, become quiet.
When others seek attention, turn your attention inward.
When everyone wants pageviews and sales, be valuable.
When others try to pull visitors to their sites, let people find you themselves.
When most blogs have popups and drop-downs urging readers to subscribe to their newsletters, get out of your readers’ way.
When others brag of their success, let others laud you instead.
When others cling greedily to copyrights, give your work away.
When others use goals to drive themselves to change the world, learn to be content, and people will ask to learn your secrets.
I’ve found all of the above to be true. When you’ve created something of real value, you don’t need to do any marketing, spend any money on advertising, or push people to subscribe.
People will find you, and they’ll think you’re so great they want to tell their friends about it. Your readers will become your marketers. Your value will become your advertising budget.
Imagine owning a muffin shop. If the muffins are commonplace, you’ll have to advertise and do some “guerilla marketing” to get customers. But if your muffins make people roll their eyes in ecstasy, they will tell the world of your deliciousness, and the world will pound on your muffin-scented door.
Become quiet, find contentedness, become valuable. These trump marketing every time, and as you learn to listen to your inner music, you can now ignore the marketers hawking their oils of snakedness.
Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, ...
Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should never the less be played at maximum volume.
~ VGM
February 28, 2013
THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT RETURNS ON THURSDAY APRIL 11th TO THE DIRTY MARTINI BAR & LOUNGE
Reblogged from THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT, ALBANY NY:
They return in the night. The poets and their words.
And their voices shall take over the world …
HERE'S THE NEWS : AND IT'S OFFICIAL
The School Of Night, Albany-NY's
OPEN MIC FOR POETS, POETRY &
THE SPOKEN WORD IS BACK ON EVERY 2ND THURSDAY OF EACH MONTH!
ONE MIC * ONE SIGNUP &
ALL ABOUT THE POETRY IN A BRAND NEW LOCATION AT…
Hosted by yours truly on April 11th. If you are in Upstate NY I hope you'll join us!
February 26, 2013
THIS SONG WHICH NEVER ENDS
THIS SONG WHICH NEVER ENDS
Such words,
Poetry rare
Exulting reality
Into voice Expression
Into being
Being into form.
From out of ashes
Out of seasons
Years time and reason
And from out of every man
Woman born
Conceived.
All truths shadows And all loves
Destructions and voices
Perceived
Complete and thus returning
Like Angels
Like Gods
Again to tell their stories
Or to tell the tale
The myth, the verse or the prayer
The hymn manifested
Again
For here is your
Hero
Your villain
And your Goddess renewing
The world
And here is your song:
Their song
Our song
All songs
Beginning &
Then ending again
These poems and these words
A dance A waltz
These songs remaining, returning
Like every prophecy foretold in
The past The present & The future
Born from
Every sun
Every star
Every moon
And every daughter
Within every universe
Contained.
For this place, world
Is a universe made up
Of dust & words, language
And resurrections
Hello
Goodbye
Farewell
Love
Death
And sorrows
Vision.
Such words, such voices
Poetry rare
Exulting reality beyond
A human heart
So human, so frail
This song which never ends.
_______________
R.M. ENGELHARDT
Copyright 2013.
February 25, 2013
WHERE TO GET THE RESURRECTION WALTZ
R.M. Engelhardt is an underground writer whose poetry and writing has been widely published in many online magazines as well as in print magazines over the last 20 years or so. He is the author of several books such as “The Last Cigarette, The Collected Poems Of R.M. Engelhardt” and many others and in style is comparable to such writers as Nick Tosches, Charles Bukowski, Pessoa and even a bit of the mystic and Rimbaud are thrown in as well. What speaks to you in his poems is the crafting of the ordinary and its beauty as well as the gritty, daily reality of life and living in the 21st century. Engelhardt’s poems in this book, ”The Resurrection Waltz” Engelhardt also speaks about the questions and the relevancy of poetry and the place of the poet in a technology driven future age where it seems that the poem and poetry has been forgotten and or has been left for dead (Saint Poem).
There is even a piece in here where the poet turns to the late musician Warren Zevon and a bottle of scotch for answers to some of life’s more romantic questions. Overall? I enjoyed this book quite a bit and am glad I bought it.
~ inthedancingwave (Barnes & Noble Customer Reviews)
*Thank You! ~ R.M. Engelhardt
WHERE TO GET THE RESURRECTION WALTZ:
R.M. Engelhardt ~The Resurrection Waltz On AmazonR.M. Engelhardt’s Author Profile
R.M. Engelhardt ~The Resurrection Waltz On Buy Books Get “The Resurrection Waltz” Thru Infinity Publishing
THE RESURRECTION WALTZ ON BARNES & NOBLE BOOKS Buy The Resurrection Waltz On Barnes & Noble Books
February 24, 2013
un-art and poetry to mere literality
And he knew also that the duty of all art lay in this sort of truth, lay in the self-perceptive finding and proclaiming of truth, the duty which has been laid on the artist, so that the soul, realizing the great equilibrium between the ego and the universe, might recover herself in the universe, perceiving in this self-recognition that the deepening of the ego was an increase of substance in the universe, in the world, especially in humanity, and even though this doubled growth was only a symbolic one, bound from the beginning to the symbolization of the beautiful, to that of the beautiful boundary, even though it were but a symbolic perception, it was precisely by this means that it was enabled to widen the inner and outer boundaries of existence to new reality, even though these boundaries might not be crossed, widening them not merely to a new form but to the new content of reality which they enclosed, in which the deepest secret of reality, the secret of correlation was revealed, the mutual relation existing between the realities of the self and the world, which lent the symbol the precision of rightness and exalted it to be the symbol of truth, the truth-bearing correlation from which arose every creation of reality, pressing on through level after level, penetrating toward, groping toward the unattainable dark realms of beginning and ending, pushing on toward the inscrutable divinity in the universe, in the world, in the soul of one’s fellow-men, pushing on toward that ultimate spark of the divine, that secret, which, ready to be disclosed and to be awakened, could be found everywhere, even in the soul of the most degraded —, this, the disclosure of the divine through the self-perceptive knowledge of the individual soul, this was the task of art, its human duty, its perceptive duty and therefore its reason for being, the proof of which was art’s nearness to death, and its duty, since only in this nearness might art become real, only thus unfolding into a symbol of the human soul; verily this he knew.
But he knew also that the beauty of the symbol, were it ever so precise in its reality, was never its own excuse for being, that whenever such was the case, whenever beauty existed for its own sake, there art was attacked at its very roots, because the created deed then came to be its own opposite, because the thing created was then suddenly substituted for that which creates, the empty form for the true content of reality, the merely beautiful for the perceptive truth, in a constant confusion, in a constant cycle of change and reversion, an inbound cycle in which renewal was no longer possible, in which nothing more could be enlarged, in which there was nothing more to be discovered, neither the divine nor the abandoned, nor the abandoned in human divinity, but in which there was only intoxication with empty forms and empty words, whereby art through this lack of discrimination and even of fidelity, was reduced to un-art, and poetry to mere literality; verily, this he knew, knew it painfully.
~ The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch
Rilke
“Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts th...
Rilke
“Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”
~
Rainier Maria Rilke
Burn Brightly
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