Poetry | Reality (Lee)

I feel a poetic truth is closer than any truth that we can approach. The closer something is to poetry, the closer it is to reality. Let's just take the lyric poem as an example—the manifold quality of a lyric poem, the instantaneousness of a lyric poem, the feeling that many consciousnesses are simultaneously being enacted—that is closer to reality. The lyric moment is reality. But we don't always live in that reality. The lyric moment is closer to the truth, to me, than a narrative which is a fictive process.

Li-Young Lee

Their own concerns (Hacker)

People come to reading poetry for different reasons: for a love of language; because they're looking for writers who express their own concerns and can create some order, at least verbal, musical order, in those preoccupations.

Marilyn Hacker

Rhyme is not enough (Rukeyser)

I have been asked very often, "Don't you care about rhyme?" I do and I don't. That is, I care about the recurrence of sound deeply, deeply, and rhyme has never been enough for me. Rhyme, the European way, is is a return of sound once in a poem. I have, in my greed, wanted more than that, wanted modulation of sound changing, climbing as I think of it.

Muriel Rukeyser

Ego

Ego, accustomed to ego, perceives ego everywhere.

Poems

7 new ones, posted.

On misogyny

Misogyny is a particularly naïve and intellectually dishonest form of misanthropy.

Chicken flautas (aka taquitos)

With refried beans and leaf lettuce from the greenhouse.

On the secular

Those who say the secular is necessarily crass have no understanding of science and the way it seeks and finds beauty in assessment.

Familiar indeed (Greenblatt)

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.

Stephen Greenblatt, from The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Metaphorically speaking

Is it that there is something missing in the literal that must be intuited through the metaphorical, or that our minds are metaphorical evaluators tuned for approximation?

Negative

The impossibility of disproving a negative doesn't disprove the negative.

Bobos (Brooks)

The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and the "culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians.

David Brooks

Solitude (Machado)

Pay attention:
a solitary heart
is no heart at all.

In my solitude
I have seen very clearly
things that are not true.

Antonio Machado, from "Moral Proverbs and Folksongs"

Poem published online

My poem, "Kenosis: The Heaven of Exemption," has been published on poet Bill Knott's Atheist Poetry anthology blog. It is eligible for a $1000 prize to be awarded at the end of the year. Knott is a poet whose work interests me (I have one of his books, The Unsubscriber, and have read more of his work online), and I was excited to see that he called my poem "very impressive" in his acceptance email! Those of us working outside the usual poetry circles rarely receive any informed feedback on our poems beyond the steady flow of form rejection letters, so this meant a lot to me. And those who know me know I'm all about promoting a secular, atheistic worldview, so it's a win-win situation.

On faith

There is no sane route to faith.

Purple rice & tilapia

Here is the link for my dad's purple rice website: http://purpleblackrice.com/.

On nationalism

Nationalism is tribalism writ large and deserves a larger contempt.

Poems

I've posted 9 new poems.

Returning (Gluck)

...whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice...

Louise Gluck, "The Wild Iris"

In the desert

Back from another good visit to Louisiana. Can't wait to cook up some of the purple rice my dad developed and is selling.