Selections from The Ongoing Record of My Continuous Failure selected stories, poems, & aphorisms

by David Carl

I feel as if I were preparing to greet the apocalypse with a copy of Emily Dickinson in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Strictly for my own literary (which is to say, soteriological) purposes, I’ve been trying to imagine the possibility of a poetry that is a cross between Bashō, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery, and Osip Mandelstam; a work that does in language what Tarkovsky, Lynch, Chris Marker and Stan Brakhage were striving for in film and that evokes the music of Morton Feldman, Robert Johnson, Nina Simone, and Anthony Braxton; an aesthetic tribute to the work of Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Vaneigem, Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger; a poetry indebted to the philosophical spirit of Pascal, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and Blanchot; bearing traces of my gratitude to Conrad, Woolf, Pessoa, and Gertrude Stein; Beckett, Gaddis, Cioran, and David Markson; a work in which Moby Dick meets The Four Zoas, Montaigne greets the poet of the Mahabharata, and Kafka encounters Zhuangzi, evoking a collision between Tom Philips’ A Humument and Isodore Isou’s Venom and Eternity, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Gavin Bryars’ Sinking of the Titanic, Béla Tarr and Sonic Youth, Cat Power and Johnny Cash… in other words, the literary ambition of an anachronistic and uneasy Modernist, caught in a past that has already outpaced its future…

469 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2020