Wise man and friend D, author of the Joe Felso: Ruminations blog, had a posting this weekend that is so good it can’t be paraphrased. Rather than sending you there (although it would be time well spent since this is just one of many thought-provoking posts), I’ll make it easy and include the full text […]
Writing
Glorious Impersonality
For several years now my Sunday mornings have begun with the anticipation of reading the weekly email from Andrew that arrives in my inbox around 7am. I have saved every one he has sent to me, and for good reason. Both he and his wife Kathryn, in addition to being two of the wisest and […]
The Third Thing
When I started this blog in 2006, I did not anticipate how deeply satisfying it would be to develop companionship around content that matters to me. Sharing visual art and poetry are gestures that happen best outside of time, ones that are well suited for the disembodied 24/7 nature of cyberspheric reality. Discovery in this […]
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten
Ho Xuan Huong (written here without the diacritical marks, so my apologies to any Vietnamese readers) was an 18th century Vietnamese poet whose works were recently translated into English by the poet John Balaban. Ho Xuan Huong was well educated, but due to family circumstances including her father’s early death, her options were limited. She […]
Blogging Redux
Has it happened, are there more blogs now than people on the planet? The uncontrollable sprawl of online scribblers has led to a lot of pondering in the media lately, with cultural critics ready to unpack and dissect the implications of this curious new form of expression and interconnection. I have intentionally kept clear of […]
Jorie Graham, James Galvin et al, Part 2
This is a continuation of the essay by Jack Anders as posted below. In this section he contrasts the metaphysical and mystical qualities of Graham’s exquisite poem San Sepolcro with one of her more recent works. The distinctions he identifies ring true for me. Anders then moves his focus more specifically to poems written by […]
Fractalontology
I fell into an exquisite indentation—no, a cavern—in the landscape of the blogosphere this morning. These anomolies are scattered everywhere in this limitless expanse we call cyberspace, but each time I slide unexpectedly into one of these subrealities (or hyper-realities?) I feel like a lottery winner—random-driven lucky. I’m feeling that way now. My latest adventure […]
More than Meaning
One of the reasons I get rather depressed by the current fad for documentary style fiction, is its insistence on the explanatory above the symbolic. Good writing goes beyond its subject matter. Language is more than meaning. The things that we have read that we remember seem to move with us through our lives as […]
Waiting for the Crack
Spring Thaw in South Hadley Old snows locked under glass by last night’s ice storm left curatorial Winter, in whose hands alone we’d hope to find the keys, jangling them in the trees—. not merely in these pine needles by the fistful gloved in crystal, but, from their boughs, the self- invented digits of icicles […]
Authenticity, Identity, Reality
I’m recovering from knee surgery, so maybe that is the reason I’m sporting a surlier view of things. Bear with me here, I’ll be ambulatory and more optimistically inclined soon enough. But until then… Much has been written over the last week about the latest scandal regarding yet another faux memoir exposed. It is easy […]