Climate Change

Sudden, gale-force understanding: the role of a poet in the face of catastrophic climate change is to shelter and incubate ideas, like seeds from lost species of plants.

Wall to Wall- a facebook found poem

What's on your mind?
Write something ...

Milestones

Starting to write again, uncurling my fists like a baby learning the social smile.

First Snow

Dreamed last week about the near future- my tiny daughter, seeing her first snow.

Irony and its Opponents

This article in the NY Times by Andy Newman posits naivete and irony as foes. But I wonder about this. By definition irony seems to me a creature turned upon itself - an awareness of the
duality of awareness.

Do you know where you are/
and will you follow your own gaze?

To me the central battle of the mind is to steer insight, noise and fear towards something like cohesion. My notion of a harmony of argument is one where the center holds, and one where thematic resonances allow disparate viewpoints to get along. In this worldview irony and naivete are parts of the same whole, and frequently co-dependent, to the point of canceling one another out. Over-the-top affect of many kinds flattens into an exquisitely painful cursive script, or grows into wrought iron as a vine might grow.

What am I leaving out to make an argument? What am I glossing over? The ridiculous can still be ridiculous but I must forgive it, I suppose, even as it occurs in self and my own two eyes do see. That is the central requirement. Irony can be a poor friend. Disbelief in God defines belief in a god, and upholds it. Irony mocks naivete through tinted windows, driving by, an unreliable witness.

Ugly, Lovely

Ugly

A forlorn identity
for self-defense.
Tightness in the chest,
dimensionless work.
Sleep deprivation at dawn.

Fearing silence,
fearing books,
fearing art.


Lovely

No total darkness,
no purity of light
just a large dusty house of faceted
laughter - even forests given room,
and in the morning there is not perfection.

Henry Rollins

Freaking amazing man. I saw my first Henry Rollins performance this week in Rochester and became a fan within the first 3 minutes of the 3 hour, nonstop monologue Rollins delivered, on topics ranging from vacationing in Pakistan to Van Halen, to the problems of the unexamined rallying cry.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you ...

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

- Nelson Mandela