On writing

I write to see what I've been up to.

Disappointment

Disappointment fills space needed for enthusiasm.

Metaphorically speaking

Metaphors, unchecked, become horrors.

Not to indulge

I come to poetry to escape narrative and endless self-adoring anecdote.

Even in myth

It is true that there are few just and honest men, but there has never been a just and honest god.

New poems

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Literary criticism

The only form of literary criticism that really interests me at all is that which exists within a work, integral to its expression.

On class

Every metric of class is meaningless except privilege.

Smörgåsbord

It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who settle for a small subset of culture when they could taste it all.

All the way (Bukowski)

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

Charles Bukowski, from Factotum

Come to your senses

The sixth sense is memory. The seventh is that which concentrates the input of the first six.

Words

People who object to words I may use are not the audience for which I write them.

The change (Bronk)

I remember when it mattered as now it doesn't.
The change is not in it but in me.
I made it matter and it did. Now I don't.

William Bronk, "Bluntly"

The law

Every decent man despises the law: it doesn't exist for him.

Bunk

The interaction of bunk with history, though sometimes interesting, remains bunk.

New poems

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The ache (Harding)

Be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

Paul Harding, Tinkers

On anger

Anger is heightened frustration.

On democracy

A negative tendency of democracy is that it encourages the idea that people are not only equal but the same.

On dreams

How much of human thought, culture, and habit is based on dreams?

On totalitarianism (Camus)

None of the evils that totalitarianism claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Albert Camus

Free agreement

Are there any cases in which free agreement should not trump the general constraints of the law?

Falsehood (Camus)

Falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence.

Albert Camus

On reduction

Not all reduction exists in specificity.

What we choose to lose

It is a false sort of regret to weep over what people abandon when given the freedom of choice.

New poems

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On revolution

Revolution reveals another face of the world, not a new world.

But isn't evolution finished?

Culture thwarting evolution is evolution.

On poetry

The best poetry is delicious.

Our living reproof (Camus)

We had much to overcome—and, first of all, the constant temptation to emulate you. For there is always something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efficiency. Our great virtues eventually became tiresome to us. We become ashamed of our intelligence, and sometimes we imagine some barbarous state where truth would be effortless. But the cure for this is easy; you are there to show us what such imagining would lead to, and we mend our ways. If I believed in some fatalism in history, I should suppose that you are placed beside us, helots of the intelligence, as our living reproof. Then we reawaken to the mind and we are more at ease.

Albert Camus, from "Letters to a German Friend"

Poets

Poets are jesters to the stable.

Both at once (Pascal)

A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.

Blaise Pascal

Writing tip

Tell a little, show more, demonstrate a lot.

On empathy

Empathy is terrible at math.

No one (Peterson)

Look at your money. No one is smiling.

Allan Peterson

One or the other

We must blaspheme against certainty or against truth.

New poems

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Will be

Neither was nor is imply will be.

The greatest power

Creation or reinterpretation—which is the greatest power?

The compound fracture (Hoagland)

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness.
Think first, they said of Talk.

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts.

but I couldn't and I didn't and I don't
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture...

Tony Hoagland, from "Personal"

Beautiful

Goodness may not always be beautiful, but kindness is.

In a different way (Hoagland)

You're just a citizen
of your own familiarity
who can't remember himself in a different way.

Tony Hoagland, from "The Situation"

System analysis

There is no system which human nature will not subvert.

Conversation

Conversation with inanimate objects is awkward because it is so much more difficult to coax them to speak what we want to hear rather than what they have to say.

On consciousness

Consciousness is not a stream, but a collision of tributaries.

New poems

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