Guillermo Vargas Habacuc
I’m not going to link to the photos / video of artist Habacuc’s work. If you want to see a dog starving to death as an art installation, you can search on the name.
Proposal for funding: An art installation: Guillermo Vargas Habacuc comes to my house & we tie him to a tree out back [...]
A Little Poem During a Cold Spring
Poetics
Here is the world.
It’s a cold place &
There’s not much
you can do with it–
a little shaping or
arranging around
the edges. Pattern
emerges through
accretion of detail.
Denote. Until light
clobbers you hard
in the face, a salt
wave stirred full
of sand & knocks
you off your feet
& nearly drowns
you in the actual.
The world is heavy
it turns out. Hard
with denotations.
You come up sput-
tering. At [...]
Starting Out Late
I was talking to my friend A. at dinner last night about getting older as an artist & about the way age & reputation interact in the culture of the arts. A. is a sculptor. We started out by agreeing that in the current artistic culture, one has to “make it” at a fairly young [...]
Recognition
When I was much younger, I thought writing poetry would give me a place in the world. I was good at it, after all. Maybe as good at it as a middle level pro athlete is good at his sport. I think that’s an honest claim. But if there’s pro tour for poets in the [...]
Note to the ACLU
If your telephone fundraiser is so rude she makes even a paid-up member like me hang up on her, you might want to rethink that contract with Telefund, Inc. And what the hell are you doing calling me up two weeks after I sent you fifty bucks, asking for more money? I was interrupted by [...]
Travel & Ambition
Carole left for ten days in Budapest today, driving through a snowstorm for three hours to get to the Montreal airport for her Swiss Air flight. We kept in touch by cell phone, with me acting as her navigator a couple of times by pulling up Google Maps & making sure she was on the [...]
Knitting in Flight
Carole is getting ready to do some international travel next week, so we have been going over the usual litany of indignities one is now subjected to in order to get on an airplane. Carole is also a knitter, which means she uses knitting needles, which are banned by the airline she is flying. Now [...]
Xmas Break
I keep thinking I’ll have a day or two to just kick back & read, post a couple of things on the blog, cook a nice dinner, but so far that hasn’t really happened. Until today, at least, I haven’t needed to drive in to school. I got my grades turned in last Sunday, then [...]
Bright Future in Sales, Yeah Yeah
I’ve been teaching a long time, but I have seldom had a class as dispiriting as my current Introduction to Creative Writing. It is the end of the semester & they are still unable to eliminate or transform clichés in their own work or identify them in the work of others. They are for the [...]
Jihadis from Morocco
There is a remarkable essay by Andrea Elliott in the NY Times Magazine about a group of boys who grew up in Tetouan Morocco & became jihadis in Spain & Iraq. Though it was many years ago, I traveled through Tetouan & then further south in Morocco. Perhaps that is why I found the accounts [...]
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