Bluefin tuna, one of many ocean fish at risk Book updates: Dorothea Lasky‘s most recent book, Black Life, is reviewed in the Boston Globe today. I just recently discovered Lasky and am a fan of both Poetry is Not a Project and Awe. In this review Michael Brodeur speaks to the contrasts at play in […]
Poetry
In Awe of “Awe”
Whatever you Paid for That Sweater, It was Worth It Be scared of yourself The real self Is very scary. It is a man But more importantly The man is tall And is everything in you that is an absolute reverse of all your actions. In you he will do things and in you no […]
Cherrying the Mind
Anne Carson’s poem overlooks Boston Harbor alongside the ICA First Chaldic Oracle There is something you should know. And the right way to know it is by a cherrying of your mind. Because if you press your mind towards it and try to know that thing as you know a thing, you will not know […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Basking in that Uncertain Space
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 […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
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 […]
Weirdly Clear
Nox, by Anne Carson (Photo: Tony Cenicola) I’ve followed Anne Carson’s work for many years. She’s a complex persona—part professor of classics, poet, novelist, essayist, critic and all around category buster—exploring a wide range of topics, approaches and methodologies. Meghan O’Rourke’s description is apt: “Anne Carson has somehow become a culture hero—the ‘anti-bourgeois’ variety of […]
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 […]