I fell upon a small hand-assembled book while I was in New York: Poetry is Not a Project, by Dorothea Lasky, published by Ugly Duckling Presse. (A visit to their site is a quirky and “artisanal” (but of course—they are located in Brooklyn!) adventure that made me want to know more, much more about what […]
Poetry
- Aesthetics
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Poetry’s Leaky Margins
Anne Carson and Rashaun Mitchell: Ms. Carson, a poet, and Mr. Mitchell, a dancer and choreographer, collaborated on “Nox” and “Bracko” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. From left, Marcie Munnerlyn, Mr. Mitchell, Carol Dougherty,Ms. Carson, Robert Currie and Kate Gilhuly in “Bracko.” (Photo: Liza Voll) My admiration for the poet Anne Carson […]
Merwin: Past and Present
The Times’ put it this way: “The famously handsome Mr. Merwin in his younger years.” Wow. Few poets get that accolade… (Photo: Dido Merwin) A moment to contemplate W. S. Merwin, a poet whose work I respect but I often take for granted. As Dwight Garner wrote in a recent article in the New York […]
The Strange Notes of our Wildness
The flying foxes (bats) in Sydney’s Hyde Park. They are an extreme statement of wildness very close at hand. It is not skill, knowledge, intellect, good luck or bad, but choosing to feel the strange notes of our wildness, for there is not nothingness despite the easy magic of despair. Another moment spent in the […]
Sailing Out Munchingly
Rayme 1, mixed media on canvas (to be included in my upcoming show at the Brooklyn Workshop Gallery) Quick Black Hole Spin Change I don’t like it— two massive Black Holes each twirling at the core of two merging galaxies get close enough to fuse together then quick as a wink just as they are […]
A Certain Body Heat
He Lit a Fire with Icicles For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001 This was the work of St. Sebolt, one of his miracles: he lit a fire with icicles. He struck them like a steel to flint, did St. Sebolt. It makes sense only at a certain body heat. How cold he had to get to learn […]
The Small Ones
Larter 3, a new painting from a series that may be inspired by the astral zone (but you can never be too sure) Outside History These are outsiders, always. These stars— these iron inklings of an Irish January, whose light happened thousands of years before our pain did; they are, they have always been outside […]
Horses Into Ghosts
[the horses] I wanted to ask how do I do this how do I keep doing this how do I stop I once required the moon no once your voice moved the moon for hours across the skylight and the stove burned itself out and the stars followed suit eight hours passed and the moon […]
Hitting High Notes
After the St. Francis Dam Concrete mostly, fractured spans of handrails in their new rust, insistent brown rabbits. Downstream from the floodwave, now someone’s house, green lawn, the sun thick with its own agenda. More rabbits. Ghosts from here to the ocean though I know days aren’t made from holding back and watching bunnies. To […]
(Im)Perfect Circles
And yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? This koanic line from Bashō became the thread through a variety of impressions and images for me this morning. *** When The Shoe Fits Ch’ui the draftsman Could draw more perfect circles freehand Than with a compass. His fingers brought […]