Don't stop

Every villain contained is a victory.

New poems

+10

Scotch eggs

Bits from The Opening of the Field (Duncan)

What frivolities have you gatherd against the Night?

Tears have drownd the Flames of Animal Delight.

...so easily purged of whatever we thought we were to be...

Robert Duncan, from The Opening of the Field

Stir-fried pork

New poems

+8

Expand

Expand experience until you expire.

Tradition

My tradition is the inclusion of all that appeals to me.

The Chaffey Review

The Chaffey Review is going to publish two of my poems, "Between a Gap and a Lapse" and "Lusus Indorum," in their upcoming Volume 10. Their last issue was censored (pulled and distribution ceased) by their school administration, so I think I'm probably in good company!

Grilled chicken

The destruction of an ordinary moment (Zakaria)

There is an inherent cruelty in every terror attack—an undeniable reverberation of evil in the destruction of an ordinary moment and the forced marriage of that moment to sudden violence.

Rafia Zakaria, from Guernica

Terror (Gopnik)

What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker

Change + time

Variation may seem to imply creation, but it's only change plus time.

Charcoal sketch

I sat for a charcoal sketch by an artist in the Bangkok Art & Culture Center on my last day in Thailand.

Elegy for Edges

The Fieldstone Review (University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon) has accepted my poem "Elegy for Edges" for inclusion in their 2013 issue. My first Canadian publication!

Strawberry Dutch baby

Words

If you crave novelty, words are the cheapest way to achieve it.

Bait-and-switch

Advertise simplicity if you want to sell complexity.

New poems

+7

Strawberry cake

Constructed from these cake and icing recipes, with the addition of fresh strawberries.

Lyric aphorism

An Essay on Lyric Aphorism in Contemporary Poetry by Hannah Brooks-Motl.

“Potentially multiple,” she writes, the voice of a lyric poem is “not reducible to the realm of single-subject epiphanies.” The troubling, and troublesome, “single-subject” (that is, the speaker of the poem considered as a singular, univocal presence) is one that lyric aphorism effectively scrambles, and might even do away with. For poets cautious of the ways “subjectivity” can almost automatically inflect voice, lyric aphorisms’ disembodied timbre allows for epiphany that is not relegated to the “single-subject”; yet it also offers, as a kind of Hippocratean fact, an utterance that is grounded in personal observation, even personality.

[Susan] Sontag, writing about the great Romanian aphorist Cioran, described “the aphoristic style” as “less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it’s the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.”

Thai food

Tried a couple of Thai dishes with mixed luck:

Thai pork ball soup (gaeng jued)


And a Thai minced pork omelet (kai jeow moo saap).

I hope I get better at recreating these dishes—there are a lot that I am missing!

A job (Wright)

I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.

C. D. Wright, from "Personals"

Circumstance

Existence is essential
but circumstance falls from casual causation.

New poems

+5

Looking

What we look for in poems is what we look for everywhere.

What we find depends on how we look.

Irish Soda Bread Muffins

These are excellent.

A journey (Shteyngart)

Don't let them tell you life's a journey. A journey is when you end up somewhere.

Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

The haunting (Gamble)

It is difficult for me to believe that a piece of writing can be significant/relevant/consequential if it does not give the reader some (at least slightly) challenging experience in which to participate; a poem in which the poet presents a problem and then resolves that problem without the help of the reader is tidily finished to the point of being dismissible. How can poems matter to us if they don’t stay with us for some duration of time after we have finished reading them? And why would a poem stay with us if there was nothing in it to trouble or perplex us a little bit? Poems must haunt the reader.

Hannah Gamble

Seoul

Street shot in Seoul near Insadong. Note the guy with the cane. I've never seen so many older people with limps—was there a time around 30 years ago when they used to punish people by breaking their knees?