Flounder

Flounder with a wasabi cream sauce, mushroom-
flavored oven toast, and sauteed balsamic squash.

Are you busy?

To be forever busy is to avoid the responsibilities of humanity.

Fried chicken

It's getting better. At least this batch had a crispy outer layer. Recipe from the latest issue of Cook's Illustrated.

Word Riot

The August edition of Word Riot is now online, with my poem, "Amends."

Some kind of personality

Any series of lines or sentences, no matter how unusually or unexpectedly juxtaposed in a poem, immediately starts to accrue some kind of personality for the reader.

Matthew Zapruder

Banality

Banality is a transient condition.

On meaning

Nothing means anything except in books.... Meaning is demeaning.

Lee Siegel, Love In A Dead Language

The land of poetry

Who wants to understand the poem
Must go to the land of poetry.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On poetry

Too much of what poses as poetry is mere anecdote: character sketches of old flames; childhood scenes recollected in tranquility decades later; backyard animal studies; clever jokes. But a true poem, it seems to me, isn't just a pleasantry. It changes something for the reader. Maybe everything.

Blow away

The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones.... We may expect [physiology and chemistry] to give the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years of questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis.

Sigmund Freud

Without

Brain without kindness is a curse.
Heart without reason is worse.

Poetry

For most, poetry is just another way to socialize.

Not as mystical as it sounds

You can only see through your I.

Even when (Mandelstam)

In my chest one tear is boiling.
I'm not frightened to know that the storm will go on and on.
Some ghoul tries to hurry me, make me forget,
but even when I can't breathe I want to live till I die.

Osip Mandelstam, from "229"

The song (Mandelstam)

And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.

Osip Mandelstam, from "54"