The familiar & the true

As something becomes more familiar, it may seem more right, truer:  it may not be.

The only thing (Vonnegut)

The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything.  Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones and tubes?

No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time.  And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., from Unready To Wear

To stay a writer (Zambreno)

Kafka's insurance firm was full of aspiring poets, a reminder that it is fairly commonplace to want to be a writer or poet.  It is more unusual to stay a writer despite lack of status or outward success, to sacrifice sanity, sleep, positive well-being, health, to instead dwell in a life that is one of almost constant paranoia, oscillating between horror at invisibility and nausea at visibility.

Kate Zambreno, from To Write As If Already Dead

On patience

Patience is not a virtue, it's a strategy—often a highly effective one.

New poems

+15

Tolstoy Together

I received my author's copy yesterday of Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, which includes some of my comments. The book releases officially on the 14th.

Assumption

If you assume the world to be concrete, everything that follows will be in error.

What is real

If what is real is no longer beautiful,
how many people will decide
that what is real is no longer true?

Illusions

Everything you believe is real is an illusion.
Do you believe illusions are real?

To what extent

To what extent are our inquiries our injuries?

Sophomoric

There is nothing more sophomoric than the epithet "sophomoric."

The pattern

The pattern of infinite patterns looks like chaos.

Raspberry Pie

From this recipe.

What is missed

Of everything that goes, what is missed most is enthusiasm.

Perhaps

Perhaps good exists only to intensify the experience of bad via contrast.

Easier (Neruda)

What is my poetry? I don’t know. It would be easier to ask my poetry who am I.

Pablo Neruda

Lessons

Life is full of lessons
that death renders irrelevant.

Empathy

Empathy is the beginning, not the end.

On fears

The most debilitating fears disguise themselves as practical concerns.

On choice

Choice is a chance.