Nose-deep on a Sunday

Beer and Poincaré

Reading an essay by Henri Poincaré and a book by John Beer, it occurs to me:

a poem is ground for invention.

Each reader, each reading, always the invention occurs in the act of engaging the words.

A kelson of the creation

We can argue about the poetry, but Robert Hass is hands down the best teacher of poetry we have today. I love this interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air:

automatic class generator

the blockbuster movie stylings of milton's paradise lost

the uses of synecdoche

how metaphor is foundational to thought

thing is to place: the new syllogism

is everything allegory or is this just a prison?

Poem for the new year (petit mal)

The lord of absence turns
away from absence
a spiral

raises the top of his head
to a dome An aura
some sense in themselves

when neurons storm open
too many paths at once

The ant turns
into the ant turns
into the ant Each

segment of its body
glistens The colony
won’t wait

Let’s

"The future of hardcover publishing is at stake"

When did we go from caring about words/stories/ideas to worrying about boards & paper?

RT http://www.twitter.com/PD_Smith: "The future of hardcover publishing is at stake." -- Nat Sobel, literary agent

The long flash

What if epiphany is not a brief flash that changes everything? Lessons of spiritual practice suggest that the flash of insight is usually illusion, or, at best, passing.

Blake's epiphanies are not flashes, but worked out in the dialogue between Heaven and Hell. Not of one, not the other, but of the long, dynamic interplay.

In Bill Viola's show up now at James Cohan Gallery, the bodies of light ("Saints," "Innocents," "Acceptance," et al) look like epiphanic experiences emerging from between life and death. But the flash of your own life? It feels long, right? Messy. Complicated. And yet, underneath the busyness of this or that daily white-noise-actions, the flux of apparent needs, wants, responsibilities, there is a tone that some call personality. It might even be something like what some refer to as soul. But what if that personality -- is it warm? generous? frightened? mean? -- is part of that individual's one experience. The long flash we live in. It just depends on the speed of the film, the exposure, the settings, including distance, we see it by.