here's what's up

So, I haven't posted much of anything of late, much less any poems. Very busy lately. And, to be completely honest, I haven't written any poems worth a-posting (or really at all). However! I did place the elegy I wrote for Tyler in The Arava Review - and there was great rejoicing in the land! So that will be forthcoming. I'll let you know when - it may be awhile.

Hopefully as I go through school there will also be some more words.

my favorite sage

"I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens."
— Woody Allen

an artist and his words

"You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way."
— William Carlos Williams

any number of reasons to want novels to survive

"There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

— Lev Grossman, from the recent cover article in Time on Franzen and his new novel, Freedom.

I'm on my way to see Franzen give a reading at downtown Seattle tonight. After reading his controversial, sweeping novel The Corrections this past summer, I'm quite excited to see someone whose work is not only a part of the conversation of the literary world but of our culture as a whole! What, novels, relevant? Yes!

(Also, this happens to be my 100th post here!)

stack your lines

Stack your lines

in a way that beats time!

Cobble them with pictures

to puncture holes inside homes

where the soul hides;

circumscribe the abstract thought

with a heavy green one

and somehow don't write

about fields or trees or for

Christ's sake

or a nightingale--

that one's done.

Keats did it well enough,

you should leave well enough alone.

But fields and trees are fixed--

silent silos of eternity,

and will feel when thought

is not enough--

when I first walked with Roethke

through his

fields I fell

and ripped open my knees,

but my eyes,

the things they saw

as I lost myself

in that living green--

All of this is a mystery.

a boy's summer solitude

When I'm almost

asleep I dream

of evening sky

a blown-out

red, a ripe apple

colored wound,

a scene from older

drives I took

alone

in my dad's truck,

over dust-brown

roads where

I clutched

at need,

stopped

to weep

near a pine-built

dilapidated

shed filled with tools

I'd tried

and failed

to learn to use.

(thank you.)

Yesterday you were here

where no one is

when I am there

where no one

was near

me before.

Here is where my skin

is always burned.

Where my belly

turns endlessly,

the wall at the shallow canal

where I

sit listless

watching carbon grey

cargo ships pass in and out

weighted with coal

and other

torched things -

they navigate

the thin grey

water-vein as I

navigate

myself

as you sit near me

where no one

was

near me before.