Thank you Regina Hackett at Another Bouncing Ball for highlighting the latest from quirky dry-humored phenom Miranda July. Her films (Me and You and Everyone We Know) and writing (No One Belongs Here More Than You) dance me into a conceptual space that is reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s installation art in its smooth side swipe […]
Caretakers
The new Poets House building in Lower Manhattan near the Hudson (Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) As the plethora (din?) of voices and venues in the online free for all continues to expand exponentially, it is so helpful to have your own trusted list of favorites. Judith H. Dobrzynski is one of mine. […]
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The Primaries
Friedrich Nietzsche Bodies. Language. Expression. Metaphors. Meaning. That’s a list of issues that most people who make things think about. A lot. A recent article from the Boston Globe written by Drake Bennett touches on a lot of these themes, particularly how metaphor both comes from and impacts the way we think. Here’s a sampling: […]
Paradisio
Diamond light . . “[He] sang beyond the genius of the sea” . . Foam painting waves . . Rough water on Monday/Yom Kippur, following a storm at sea . . There’s no better balm than a long stretch of beach, the angled light of late September, a weekend in a house overlooking the sea, […]
Taking a Break
Fix me, Small Point, fix me Thirty of us are venturing up to our favorite remote corner of Maine for four days to celebrate the landmark birthdays for two of our group. This is a same tribe of friends who spent a wonderful holiday together at this very spot the weekend before 9/11. It became […]
Lay It Down Like You Know You Know How
I have recently (re)fallen under the spell of Levon Helm’s music. His latest releases—Dirt Farmer (2007) and Electric Dirt (2009)—have some cuts that will be part of the soundtrack for this phase of my life. “The Mountain,” by Steve Earle, (on Dirt Farmer) is a heartbreak every time I listen. And “When I Go Away” […]
Letting Go
The point here is to take life in all its rich variety just as it is, with its ten thousand opposites, and to go along with whatever circumstances require, embracing things after their own inclination or according to chance, letting things be rather than getting in their way, and thus allowing each and every thing, […]
McHughing
Two poems from newly-anointed MacArthur genius Heather McHugh: Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun A book is a suicide postponed. —Cioran Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person? I blame the soup: I’m a primordially stirred person. Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings. The apparatus of his selves made an ab- […]
McHugh’s MacArthur
Heather McHugh How nice when the arbiters of taste and genius align themselves with my way of seeing the world. The MacArthur Genius Grant recipients have just been announced, and a well deserved award goes to poet Heather McHugh. Her fabulous poem, Coming, was posted here on Slow Muse in June of 2008. Here’s what […]
Sleep to Grief as Air is to the Rain
The Eden of the Author of Sleep And sleep to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking, no explanation, just blue spoons of the eucalyptus measuring and pouring torrents. A kind of winter. As if what is real had been buried and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me or the world, risen […]