4 July 2019: "This Is Just to Say" Day Two by Kenneth Koch

Day two: "This Is just to Say" Series, click the link for more info.

"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos William" by Kenneth Koch

                                                                  1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next

     summer.

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

and its wooden beams were so inviting.

                                                                  2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together

and then I sprayed them with lye.

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

                                                                  3

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten

     years.

The man who asked for it was shabby

and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

                                                                  4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy, and

I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

29 July: "SIX ONE-LINE FILM SCRIPTS" by Tom Andrews

Tom Andrews

SIX ONE-LINE FILM SCRIPTS 

Film Noir
Everyone on earth is asleep – except Robert Mitchum.

French Flic
The camera is an emptiness that longs to be a camera.

Historic Epic
Thousands of extras…reset their alarm clocks.

Stéphane Mallarmé Counts the Buttons on the Hangman’s Vest
Mallarmé: Two, three…no…two…no…wait, two, three…one, two…

God, Guilt and Death
This will not work on film.

The Needle
Medium shot of a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle.

21 Jul: "The Printer's Error" by Aaron Fogel

The Printer's Error

Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer's Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers' errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer's trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.

Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers' protest,
and errors by
God's touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.