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My month in paradise has come to an end & I have returned to . . . paradise. It is lovely to be home, though it’s going to take a while to get through the mail. I already feel a bit of nostalgia for BMC, but am also carrying forward certain consolidations in my work [...]
BMC: Finishing Up
I’ve been circumspect blogging about BMC — I don’t want to have the sense that I’m invading anyone’s privacy, while at the same time wanting to give some impression of my time here. (I have in fact password protected one post that seemed overly personal.) Now that the month is winding down, I’d just like [...]
BMC Photos
Here is a link to pictures of BMC. I’ll post more to the set in the next few days.
First Week at BMC
To be honest, the first couple of days I just decompressed. While other residents were saying things like “each day is so precious I can’t bear to waste a minute!” I was drinking beer & sleeping, doing some reading & note-taking. Then I flailed around with my work for a couple of days, then I [...]
Heading Out
Tomorrow I’ll be leaving idyllic South Colton for the even more idyllic Blue Mountain Center, a place where artists and writers spend a month working free from the distractions of . . . What? Exactly? Well, anyway, we call it work so our spouses will let us go. What was that old New Yorker cartoon? [...]
Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience
In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet [...]
Corrupter of Youth
I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]
“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]
Animal Cruelty
In a comment to the previous post, Chris Robinson makes reference to a poem from my book Magical Thinking. We bear a special responsibility, greater perhaps than the responsibility we bear toward each other, to care for animals. Whichever philosopher said that we reveal our character through our treatment of those weaker than ourselves was [...]
Postcard Collage Project
I’ve started a project to send handmade postcards to poets & artists I know around the country, with comments about poetry & poetics. You can see the very beginnings of the project by clicking the project link in the Sharp Sand header. Thumbnails link to somewhat larger images.
keep looking »
