Something Like #51: The Prophet, with Bitsy Knox

Shortly before the advent of 2023, I pulled the same Tarot card, always reversed, three times. It was the Three of Cups. The first time, it was greeted by a foreboding chorus of uh-oh's. The second time, a borrowed cat chose it for me. The third time, I knew it was coming, and had prepared myself to answer to the image: Wounds become scars, and scars tell stories of adventure.

On New Year's Day, I read Alice Notley's The Prophet, (1979), which starts with, "They say there is a dying star which is traveling in two directions. / Don't brood over how you may have behaved last night. If you / Can't remember that much about it, don't ask anyone else about it / Except a little, in case you were wonderful in your abandon. / Don't gloat if you were wonderful, for you have a hangover, ass, / Soon you'll be old and you will still be this childish. . .

This episode celebrates reading and listening to music, with offerings in mind.

1. I begin with Renee Gladman, The Eleven Calamities, Calamities, 2016 (Wave Books)
2. Then CAConrad, Painted Pigeon Project, (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, 2014 (Wave Books)
3. Bernadette Mayer reads The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica (1968) at a poetry reading in 2019
4. Bhanu Kapil reads Poem Seven from How to Wash a Heart, 2020 (Liverpool University Press) on the occasion of winning the TS Eliot Prize
5. I then read Asiya Wadud, Anything is Light when it Bears it Heavy: Etching a Name onto a Malleable Surface from New Weathers, Poetics from the Naropa Archive, ed. Anne Waldman and Emma Gomis, 2022 (Nightboat)
6. Finally, I read Alice Notley, The Prophet (1979) from Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, 2006 (Wesleyan University Press)
7. As ever, thank you to Roger 3000 for Something Like's theme music.