The cat is a dilettante in fur.
quote by Theophile Gautier
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.
quote by George V. Higgins
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Life must be something more than dilettante speculation.
quote by Anna Julia Cooper
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I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts.
quote by Thomas Wilson
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Georgine Sand Miner
A step-mother drove me from home, embittering me.
A squaw-man, a flaneur and dilettante took my virtue.
For years I was his mistress -- no one knew.
I learned from him the parasite cunning
With which I moved with the bluffs, like a flea on a dog.
All the time I was nothing but "very private" with different men.
Then Daniel, the radical, had me for years.
His sister called me his mistress;
And Daniel wrote me: "Shameful word, soiling our beautiful love!"
But my anger coiled, preparing its fangs.
My Lesbian friend next took a hand.
She hated Daniel's sister.
And Daniel despised her midget husband.
And she saw a chance for a poisonous thrust:
I must complain to the wife of Daniel's pursuit!
But before I did that I begged him to fly to London with me.
"Why not stay in the city just as we have?" he asked.
Then I turned submarine and revenged his repulse
In the arms of my dilettante friend. Then up to the surface,
Bearing the letter that Daniel wrote me,
To prove my honor was all intact, showing it to his wife,
My Lesbian friend and everyone.
If Daniel had only shot me dead!
Instead of stripping me naked of lies,
A harlot in body and soul.
poem by Edgar Lee Masters
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Pangs of Deliverance
I watched you spin the tables
And reduce the forsaken fables
To an ostensible cacophony
And peel the enswathed naïveté
You stepped out of threshold
Your calloused hands groping
For the advent of an extra age
And your sallow eyes shattering
In the rancor miasma of derision
It may not be a debonair memory
But I remembered it too clearly
And I am ready to regurgitate
The living ghost in my cranial vault
And I do not intend to procrastinate,
Nor do I need a fire to instigate,
What I need is a hollering nostrum
From an insolent dilettante
To acquaint myself with
The point of self deception
An abandonment that recoils
In the trigger of a double barrel gun.
poem by Norman Santos
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Daniel M'Cumber
When I went to the city, Mary McNeely,
I meant to return for you, yes I did.
But Laura, my landlady's daughter,
Stole into my life somehow, and won me away.
Then after some years whom should I meet
But Georgine Miner from Niles -- a sprout
Of the free love, Fourierist gardens that flourished
Before the war all over Ohio.
Her dilettante lover had tired of her,
And she turned to me for strength and solace.
She was some kind of a crying thing
One takes in one's arms, and all at once
It slimes your face with its running nose,
And voids its essence all over you;
Then bites your hand and springs away.
And there you stand bleeding and smelling to heaven!
Why, Mary McNeely, I was not worthy
To kiss the hem of your robe!
poem by Edgar Lee Masters
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The Collective: The Snow Angel
Immaculate skin of snow
Interposing a delicate silhouette,
Broad wings and halo
Whittled from a wintry bassinet,
Garish ease, ornate and callow
Suppurates the winter's sonnet
Innocuous as a fairytale
Baffling as a dilettante cacophony:
In a grave you lay frail
Unencumbered by the girdle of gravity
Is this your flight's scale?
A somber and inert soliloquy?
Who and what made you, snow angel?
An impression in the penultimate
Death of warmth that dangles
In the purple lips to commiserate
The enigma of your treacle:
A tragedy of dreary fate
Thaw not into this expostulating slate
A great effigy, nevertheless, great
poem by Norman Santos
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Conversations with Mother (Revised)
Don’t sell your house we said, you scorned
advice and went ahead – and despite our
fervent counseling still fell afoul of vice of
renting from the asset sale until all funds had
run away; bankruptcy now means you have
no options left
A medical fund is vital we advised, but you
declined the wisdom there enshrined, preferred
to trust in God; you suffer pain and yet refuse
to seek the aid the government provides, when
you relented finally you find an eight month
queue awaiting you
How will you deal with pain? Your daughter
seeks to raise the cash for private care – her
husband works belatedly to make ends meet;
can’t you see your risky life boasts only of your
carelessness, does not impress when others have
to bear your dilettante encumbrance
What should I say – that you refused to ready for
old age? Indeed, I do regret your choices failed
and boomeranged on you, the pity is your lacking
ears to hear advice you never listened to, and
won’t so it will make no difference anyway…
poem by Margaret Alice Second
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Holiday For The Forgotten
Here, have some of my holiday,
Reveling in the blares of soliloquy
And watching the stars shift their bones
Waiting for the first signs of dawn
And laying awake in your bedroom
Until the sunspots would fritter away
Again, back into the Mobius Strip
Of impassable holidays.
Come take a seat in my banquet
A hollow table for eight people
With sutured lips and eyes,
A superfluity of feast and revelry
In a plethora of emptiness,
That would keep us bloated
All through the gaudy merriment
Of the dilettante eve.
Succor in the warmth of an empty hearth
And be accustomed to the comport
Of the bleak echoes of silence
And let us open the presents
That we wrapped for ourselves
And the unanticipated letters
Of coveting unfettered friends,
Inebriate with the pangs of jealousy.
Evocatively, inexorably,
A surfeit of effervescent air
Can suffocate the trampled ones
Whose names were not inscribed
In the jaunty arms of carousals
But we, we will breath our own air
With the cinders of schmaltz flair
Cordially inviting in the holiday of the forgotten.
poem by Norman Santos
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Work
Andy was a catholic
The ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother
Collecting gossip and toys
Every sunday when he went to church
Hed kneel in his pew and say
Its work
All that matters is work
He was a lot of things
What I remember most hed say
Ive got to bring home the bacon
Someones got to bring home the roast
Hed get to the factory early
If youd ask him hed tell you straight out
Its work
No matter what I did it never seemed enough
He said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, how many songs did you write
Id written zero, Id lied and said, ten
You wont be young forever
You should have written fifteen
Its work
You ought to make things big
People like it that way
And the songs with the dirty words
Make sure your record them that way
Andy liked to stir up trouble
He was funny that way
He said, its just work
Andy sat down to talk one day
He said decide what you want
Do you want to expand your parameters
Or play museums like some dilettante
I fired him on the spot
He got red and called me a rat
It was the worst word that he could think of
And Ive never seen him like that
Its work
I thought he said its just work
Andy said a lot of things
I stored them all away in my head
Sometimes when I cant decide what I should do
I think what would andy have said
Hed probably say you think too much
Thats cause theres work that you dont want to do
Its work
The most important thing is work
Its work
The most important thing is work
song performed by by Lou Reed
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Debut
Eighteen roses
with manifold thorns
floridly swaying with
the flummox of motes
and then there was
a single carnation
unabashedly uncurling
and prying behind
the reticent curtains
of my endless nights
Eighteen candles
with mouthful of garish lights
devouring moths
with ludicrous invitations
and then there was
a lone chandelier
flickering many orbs
to a consummate glow
to deluge the dark and unfurl
these clandestine volitions
Eighteen treasures -
flamboyance gilded by
dilettante architectures
profligate the leisure
and pillage the quintessence
and then there was
a lissome string
unfettered from the poisons
of mediocre demarcations
unlatch the vault and reveal
your struggles, your lights, your shadows
Eighteen years
of an eternal waltz caroming
the clean lines of living
bemuse the fastidious poetry
and outgrow your limitations
and then there was
a single descrying of time
when your roses shall blossom,
your candles shall hone visions,
your treasures shall encompass grandiosity;
now, titillate your shy unreality.
poem by Norman Santos
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Dance Of Lost Phantoms
A brimful of hath had gone astray
With the torpor of the rainy days
As the patina of tobacco-scent sliced
A wanton interpolation beneath my nose
Where the balmy cloys created a fog
Hollering your frangible visage
Beneath the mistral canopy and the sapid
Temptations of the dilettante eve
I beseech for a putrefied glory
That used to ripple beneath my feet
Where had gone the buoyancy
And the ethereal perpetuity
Extending eloquently
With every heaving breathe?
Where gone the pillars
Ensconced within the cellars
Of my swinging heart?
To what do these lungs demand?
These fingers sense a certain grave
With every shiver of your grotesque gaze
Paints patent traces of life and its vibes
The lipstick upon this weary cigarette
Sketches back to the soulless faces
And broken stories of song
Vibrant and floral salvation,
Has woe taken you away?
Into the depths of hue and despair
You aren't incapable of a dark murder
Sighing with bars clung to your chest
Can you see the sun pirouette in your name?
The blur gets denser, I see no blinking eyes
Flashes of white and cold, burning blue
Cut through the prisons of your requiem
Die with me tonight, to live another death
Die with me tomorrow, to live another end
poem by Norman Santos
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Life Is A Minestrone
Im dancing on the white house lawn
Sipping tea by the taj mahal at dawn
Hanging round the gardens of babylon
Minnie mouse has got it all sewn up
She gets more fan mail than the pope
She takes the mickey out of all my phobias
Like signing cheques to ward off double pneumonia
Life is a minestrone
Served up with parmesan cheese
Death is a cold lasagne
Suspended in deep freeze
Im leaning on the tower of pisa
Had an eyeful of the tower in france
Im hanging round the gardens of madison
And the seat of learning
And the flush of success
Relieves a constipated mind
Im like a gourmet in a skid row diner
A fitting menu for a dilettante
Life is a minestrone
Served up with parmesan cheese
Death is a cold lasagne
Suspended in deep freeze
Love is a fire of flaming brandy
Upon a crepe suzette
Lets get this romance cooking, honey
But let us not forget
Life is a minestrone
Served up with parmesan cheese
Death is a cold lasagne
Suspended in deep freeze
song performed by by 10 Cc
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Artist Oath
If to become a high minded, well respected
adult is to abandon the divine ideal
of universal kinship and good will in order to
maintain personal security,
I'll spend the entirety of my life
an irresponsible child of ignorance.
I'll run barefoot through the woods,
ignoring dinner bells,
oblivious to the darkening curfew hour of the street lamps
If profit and sales determine the merit of an artist
I shall forever define myself as dilettante
a dabbler, a hobbyist.
an amateur doing what he loves
in order to maintain personal sanity
After all, the purpose of an artist isn't
influence or profit,
it isn't to strike admiration or awe.
the aim isn't avant garde expression of emotion
or presenting a revolutionary idea that will change the world.
Art is simple encouragement,
no more than a smile,
encouraging people
to live out the ideals we all carry and know
in the most sure fire depths of our hearts to be true.
The ideals we forget lose abandon or are just too
afraid to act upon in life.
The ideals of 'the weak the senseless the naïve the eccentric
the quixotic the queer the fairy dusted bullshit'.
– its all just maya anyway
– were else can one live out ideals if not in dream?
poem by Gregory Allen Uhan
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Four A.M. Gazing
A tangential full moon was riveted
At the torpor dew of the late dawn
Have you seen how bloated ‘twas?
How ripe still it was at four AM?
No? You didn't even pry,
You have surmised a sunrise.
Well, let me fondle your metal vault,
Macadamized by forking soirées
Clad with a spurious shallow varnish,
The morning moon was ominously peering
Trough the notches of every window
Through the nicks of every undulated sleep
Like an ominous darting eye in torsion
Austerely ashen, sedentary, and pregnant
Just as the reflection of my own petrified orbits
As the crow flies into her grating unwavering stare
I trampled into a staid and hapless meandering
If there's, at least, one restless owl beseeching
And gazing bemused by the argot of the torn horizon
Staring back into the moon, even in a trifle,
Like staring into her own reflection and its stains
No one. No one, from where I raise and lay my head
Cloys the daunting moon or even try to count
The omnibus luminaries and assemble
A memory of the scene, unmarred and purged,
To gaze them in one's inertness in sleep
Like how a connoisseur and clandestine jester
Would muse upon a city or sit in a revelry,
In a fashion that no eyes would ever see
That he is picking up shards in his discreet corner;
Shards of unsullied bliss and of oblivion.
And if you haven't followed my gazing
Hear me amass the beauty of it again
You, a dilettante in a feeble ballast,
Gazing is when you had pursued my chase
And not in reading through my eccentric taste.
poem by Norman Santos
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Marcus Varro
Marcus Varro went up and down
The places where old books were sold;
He ransacked all the shops in town
For pictures new and pictures old.
He gave the folk of earth no peace;
Snooping around by day and night,
He plied the trade in Rome and Greece
Of an insatiate Grangerite.
'Pictures!' was evermore his cry --
'Pictures of old or recent date,'
And pictures only would he buy
Wherewith to 'extra-illustrate.'
Full many a tome of ancient type
And many a manuscript he took,
For nary purpose but to swipe
Their pictures for some other book.
While Marcus Varro plied his fad
There was not in the shops of Greece
A book or pamphlet to be had
That was not minus frontispiece.
Nor did he hesitate to ply
His baleful practices at home;
It was not possible to buy
A perfect book in all of Rome!
What must the other folk have done --
Who, glancing o'er the books they bought,
Came soon and suddenly upon
The vandalism Varro wrought!
How must their cheeks have flamed with red --
How did their hearts with choler beat!
We can imagine what they said --
We can imagine, not repeat!
Where are the books that Varro made --
The pride of dilettante Rome --
With divers portraitures inlaid
Swiped from so many another tome?
The worms devoured them long ago --
O wretched worms! ye should have fed
Not on the books 'extended' so,
But on old Varro's flesh instead!
Alas, that Marcus Varro lives
And is a potent factor yet!
Alas, that still his practice gives
Good men occasion for regret!
To yonder bookstall, pri'thee, go,
And by the 'missing' prints and plates
And frontispieces you shall know
He lives, and 'extra-illustrates'!
poem by Eugene Field
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Benedetta Ramus
Mysterious Benedetta! who
That Reynolds or that Romney drew
Was ever half so fair as you,
Or is so well forgot?
These eyes of melancholy brown,
These woven locks, a shadowy crown,
Must surely have bewitched the town;
Yet you're remembered not.
Through all that prattle of your age,
Through lore of fribble and of sage
I've read, and chiefly Walpole's page,
Wherein are beauties famous;
I've haunted ball, and rout, and sale;
I've heard of Devonshire and Thrale,
And all the Gunnings' wondrous tale,
But nothing of Miss Ramus.
And yet on many a lattice pane
'Fair Benedetta,' scrawled in vain
By lovers' diamonds, must remain
To tell us you were cruel.
But who, of all that sighed and swore -
Wits, poets, courtiers by the score -
Did win and on his bosom wore
This hard and lovely jewel?
Why, dilettante records say
An Alderman, who came that way,
Woo'd you and made you Lady Day;
You crowned his civic flame.
It suits a melancholy song
To think your heart had suffered wrong,
And that you lived not very long
To be a City dame!
Perchance you were a Mourning Bride,
And conscious of a heart that died
With one who fell by Rodney's side
In blood-stained Spanish bays.
Perchance 'twas no such thing, and you
Dwelt happy with your knight and true,
And, like Aurora, watched a crew
Of rosy little Days!
Oh, lovely face and innocent!
Whatever way your fortunes went,
And if to earth your life was lent
For little space or long,
In your kind eyes we seem to see
What Woman at her best may be,
And offer to your memory
An unavailing song!
poem by Andrew Lang
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When the Pendulum Swings
You are the warmth of summer's hum
Scintillating the sleepy splendor
Vapid lances of the sifting sun
Palming the ashen stupor
But when the pendulum swings
A pall would mantle the sky
And hail mad daggers of tears
Obliterating what I can espy
From your morsel graze and leers
Until the climate whisk its cleaning
A hung filigree of drab smokes
Fecundates with a thrill
On two sundered souls in cloaks
Of solitude and eyes of steel
But when the pendulum swings
A blotch of lubricious red
Demented the tacit saturnalia
In convalescence—a tirade
Of false hopes in echolalia
Binds these lungs in ailing rings
The impassable infinity
Treads an incandescent trail
Nurturing our revelries
A chaste but treacherous veil
Because when the pendulum swings
We will regurgitate from the banquet
Purged by the ephemeral lies
And no hunger shall be whet
But the evisceration of this guise
A purveyance for subsisting
Hark the mendaciloquent secrets
That the zephyr whistled through
The threadbare fortitude of your facet
A recalcitrant membrane shan't undo
But when the pendulum swings
This bastion will devour you
Like a soul in a chrysalis
Altering your machinism's screw
And beleaguer you with your own tricks
When time expand its wings
Posses the klutz lattices of time
And slosh with mediocre hearts
Contend to remember this rhyme,
Rival to forget the dilettante art
But when the pendulum swings
The lurid mirror will shatter
And unlatch the demons who stole
The innocence that kept us safer
From persnickety time's siphoning hole
Digress in attrition, live with the sting.
When the pendulum swings
Its constant beckoning.
poem by Norman Santos
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Sequestered From The Emancipated Roses, Deadlocked Thorn
The soigné ultimatum of a flyleaf
stole the peripatetic petals -
in a void facet purged
from floridly trampling texts
How they fandangoed with the flames
and glided transverse frozen brooks
is now a monastic monument
under the sun's stropping gilt
casting a plethora of shadows
that recounts the saccharine antebellum
in a soundless narrative
Amidst this sierra of statuesque memories
I orphaned all my abandonments
humbled and embarrassed, eyes downcast
and unheeding for the celestial supremacy
that waned from my succors,
Flowerless hands scathed by thorns
shearing the obsidian armor
How I loved these roses and its thorns
and avalanched with adulations
as they gyrated with the prairie wind
that pilfered the scent of a garden
manifold of the scarlet corolla of petals
soused in honeysuckled, fire breathing noses
Their bows and nods now desperately
shaking off the pollens afflicted
with the most virulent emotion
The sanguine chandeliers prying
behind the daze of their colours
gave bluster to the parasol-wings and in
the upheaval, they are flowers no longer -
The roots untied to mangle with vicissitude
as my mouth regurgitates ink
from groveling before their banquets
as sly as a firefly around a candle
measuring the undoing of impasse -
always a trifle behind the trail,
running out of wiles, out of time
a scentless hound without a bark
hunting for the smoke of flaming roses
But the dilettante architecture
that gave frame to this lucid dream
is now sullen with lifeless age
brooding for the empty shelves
and the cobweb's noiseless violins
because there is nothing more,
nothing harder to forgive
than the sunrise that shone
with premature mildews
after the flower's withering.
poem by Norman Santos
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Ad Astra Per Aspera
Hiss with the silence if it wouldn't stir,
Brave the lion with congealed fear,
And you'll figure how the bullets sing
Embracing the force without ducking the sting
In a rippling dream of kerosene
Ignite the flame of the obscene
Vista of nakedness dispensed into lewd
Vulnerability, though the sentries stood
With all the surrealistic smatters
Of the reeling picture behind the shutters
And the albino leaves of the old sycamore
Will pour down its vapid phosphor,
While the rustles will swoon over the soul
As it engulfed the body in whole
Dripping into her supple breasts
As the night don its very best
Subliminal guise to entice
The weary batting of wandering eyes
To severe the golden ties,
To sever the tethering lies
In a shotgun clout more pliant than
A dilettante danseuse of the sun
Fondling my submission in the painful trance
Induced by the garish tempo of the dance
Of the lapses in the liminalities
When all the lovely bones sing with me
The sirens swansong of temporal keys;
Slinging mud into the skies
To give life to gravid star-cries,
And altering the times of the night
When we were one in a harried flight.
In spite of all the shifting of bridges
And all the sifting of the hinges
I still weave my web to be amongst
The sequestered blood of our long
Putrefying trail of gilded yarns
Please, take me again into your arms
And if this be painful, if this be sad
I'll sunder the glory I desire to clad
Just to be with you in your island
Licked before the isthmus can fortify the sand
Into a swarthy road towards the crown
Of your place's albino sun
And I pledge never to run athwart
In the veiled chambers the heart
Until there'll be none
No famished hope to become
The beauty in loins
Or the peril in the noise
Just one amongst the sludge
Giving birth to the remote trudge
Towards the star screams
Whispering in salient films
Hands pointing to the sky
Shearing your heaven's eyes
Like fences, divulging
Vulnerability, toppling.
poem by Norman Santos
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