We are (Paterson)

We are ourselves the void in contemplation.

Don Paterson, from "Phantom"

Either way

It is fine to be in love with striving, and it is fine not to be.

A few things (Paterson)

Here's your book back, world. Good story.
I underlined a few things. Sorry.

Don Paterson, from "Renku: My Last Thirty-five Deaths"

To die

To die satisfied: what could be better? What could be worse?

We are (Rich)

We are how we speak.

Katherine Russell Rich, from Dreaming in Hindi

Detection

The only racial uneasiness I can detect in myself is a heightened sensitivity to rejection.

Art

Don't set art aside to gaze upon and rate; rather, integrate it into the texture of your days.

Excessive human contact (Hyde)

Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other's eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact.

Lewis Hyde, from The Gift

Active wounds

You can no more forgive what still wounds than you can forget what you still remember.

History

There is no part of history untainted by shame.

Free market (Hyde)

In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.

Lewis Hyde, from The Gift

Adequacy

Adequacy is a trap that captures from both approaches.

Assumptions

I would like to abandon an assumption about poetry every day. If I'd wanted to be a conformist, I'd have become a businessman.

New poems

+6

Bound & free (Cunningham)

In the thirtieth year of life
I took my heart to be my wife,

And as I turn in bed by night
I have my heart for my delight.

No other heart may mine estrange
For my heart changes as I change,

And it is bound, and I am free,
And with my death it dies with me.

J. V. Cunningham, "Epigram #1"

Certain words

Poets who think they are too good for certain words are not good enough.

Life is not a dream? (Richardson)

How do you know life is not a dream? Because things change so slowly. Because you can focus on a page or dial a number, and when you go back to your study for your glasses, there they are, just where you left them. Because you can't fly and they don't come back from the dead. Because so often you want to believe that life is a dream.

James Richardson

Too random

I dislike poems that read like metastasizing Mad Libs.

My writing (Richardson)

As for my writing, I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going.

James Richardson

The intervals

He who defines the endpoints controls the intervals.

In the wrong place (Richardson)

The thing about the natural world, beautiful or bleak or bleakly beautiful, is that nothing seems to be in the wrong place. From this window, however, I can see the trowel I left in the yard, and I'm going to have to go down and do something about it.

James Richardson

Nothing new

Why would I want Jesus?
There's nothing new under the Son.

In changes (Richardson)

A man thinks he can hide in changes.

James Richardson, from "Iron Age"

Because it's going to happen

We have evolved in response to our environment. So what happens if we start to create radically new environments in which to live?

New poems

+6

To be the first (Mitchell)

It would take tremendous energy to be the first person not to die, the first person to live forever, simply because no one had ever done this before. If no one thinks it is possible, then no one is going to try to figure out how to put eternity together like an airplane or a submarine or a rocket. Doing it the first time without a plan, without any manual of instructions would be the hardest, but after a while, it would get easier.

Susan Mitchell

Most

Most of our conflicts arise from misunderstanding what we are.

An exhaust (Matthews)

The grand tour to the last resort
often leaves an exhaust of verse.

William Matthews

Writing

I have no wish to elevate the writing of poetry into an arcane exercise, any more than I condone the ritualization of breath. Writing, like breathing, should inhale the accident of gasses surrounding the body and exhale a subtle and idiosyncratic air, the production and release of which expresses an essence of existence.

Sorcerer hermit (Hongo)

The Chinese have a word for poet that means "sorcerer" or "magician," but it also means "hermit."

Garrett Hongo

Nothing

Nothing can be said too often, for nothing is heard enough.

Our velocities (Yu)

We wandered from room to room, just missing one another, on paths neither chosen by us nor random, but determined by our own particular characteristics, our own properties, unable to deviate, to break from our orbital loops, unable to do something as simple as walking into the next room where our beloved, our father, our mother, our child, our wife, our husband, was sitting, silent, waiting but not realizing it, waiting for someone to say something, anything, wanting to do it, yearning to do it, physically unable to bring ourselves to change our velocities.

Charles Yu, from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The difference

The difference between the original and the novel is the distance between the origin and the tourist.

Wars of imagining (Harjo)

The most honorable wars weren't fought with swords or the yelling of fools. The greatest thinkers (each representing their tribe) sat on opposite hills and had a contest to outimagine the other. You can manipulate an enemy's weakness so the enemy destroys himself/herself with foolishness.

Joy Harjo

Symbols

My dreams are no more symbolic than my life—that is to say that their symbolism is both unobservable and insignificant to me, though others may discover meaningful arrangements therein.

Confessional poets (Kennedy)

Of all the confessional poets who have confessed, does any deserve absolution?

X. J. Kennedy

New poems

+6

80% (Hall)

Eighty percent of human endeavor exists in order to prove that we are better than somebody else.

Donald Hall

Culture

Culture can rewrite the expressions of instinct.

Dying of consumption

Consumption consumes, most of all, the consumer.

On weakness

There is no weakness more debilitating, more degrading, than superstition.

A genuine sage (Miller)

One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety.

Henry Miller

The pursuit

Pursuit of novelty is a protest against death.

Fight it out (Raymond)

You can go on for a long time explaining what life means to people, but do you still not understand that you're never going to get out of this alive?

To be an animal that thinks persistently in terms way beyond its lifespan sets us a frightful problem. Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost.

The ordeal the writer sets himself is to track down existence and then, both stripped naked, fight it out.

Derek Raymond, from He Died with His Eyes Open

An argument

Society is an argument against love.

Policemen of virtue (Simic)

Schoolteachers, clergymen, and other policemen of virtue have always been in complete agreement with philosophers. No model of the ideal society since Plato has ever welcomed poets, and for excellent reasons. Poets have no respect for the authority of church and state. They are always corrupting the young, making them lazy and dreamy. Irreverence...is what they are peddling. From the point of view of group-think, such manifestations of individualism are, of course, perverse...

Charles Simic

Bigger

We are bigger when we pay attention.

New poems

+8

8th Annual Independence Day Poem

I usually post it inline on the blog, but due to formatting issues, this year I'm going to have to link to it instead:

Truths Self-Evident

The inadequacies

The inadequacies of the evolved genome are a direct consequence of the conditions under which it evolved.

Way too much

Human beings: Too much of a good thing.