Search All Winners

When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”