5 new ducklings

New poems

+15

A ticket (Chee)

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it.

Alexander Chee

Purpose

There is no purpose.
There are only opportunities
recognized or missed.

Sometimes

Sometimes it would be mad to not go mad.

On science & poetry (Le Guin)

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless "information" that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

Ursula K. Le Guin

More on poetry

Poetry is dreaming true things which provoke us with a cathartic pulse.

New poems

+15

One more (Bidart)

One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something out of not knowing enough.

Frank Bidart, from "Writing 'Ellen West'"

On poetry

Poetry is saying something, and saying it better while trying to say it best.

Abstraction of experience (Macfarlane)

In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world—its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.

Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Interested

I am interested most in a poetry of rhetoric,
a didactic lyric.

A quest (Macfarlane)

He knew only that he was committed to a quest whose meaning he did not understand, but whose necessity he could not refute.

Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Science & poetry

More and more I think science and poetry are two sides of the same coin.

New poems

+15

Of love & loss

Love is occasional,
loss is eternal.

A flashlight

Within the darkness of life, love is a flashlight which reveals, in time, the one it is focused on.

Life on the farm

Athirst (Nitobe)

Have you seen in your tour of Japan many a young man with unkempt hair, dressed in shabbiest garb, carrying in his hand a large cane or a book, stalking about the streets with an air of utter indifference to mundane things? He is the shosei (student), to whom the earth is too small and the heavens are not high enough. He has his own theories of the universe and of life. He dwells in castles of air and feeds on ethereal words of wisdom. In his eyes beams the fire of ambition; his mind is athirst for knowledge. Penury is only a stimulus to drive him onward; worldly goods are in his sight shackles to his character.

Inazo Nitobe

The essence

The essence of being is what-has-been.