A view from The Donkey Show (Midsummer Night’s Dream meets 80’s disco) ____ Nature does not stop to grieve, an observation that since time began has either appalled or inspired the human beings who have made it. Poppies sprout in bloody battlefields, and birds sing outside death-room windows. On one hand, the big thing that […]
Winter, the Unfinished, The Abandoned
Spring blossoms at the Arnold Arboretum, Boston *** The Sudden Spring The coyote had just spoken and lay down to rest in a snowdrift. March, like a fly awakened too early, droned between somnolence and a furious boredom. No one remembers the autumnal prophet, teller of drowsy stories to be continued… Winter, the unfinished, the […]
- Art Making
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Thingness
Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, featured in the film MANA: Beyond Belief, is a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Burma. Tradition claims that the boulder was placed on the cliff 2500 years ago by Burmese spirits. A gilded boulder sits on top and is believed to contain a hair of the Buddha. ______ This is a Wonderful Poem Come […]
- Books
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We’re All Bozos on This Bus*
I live with the nonchalance of the witless, clutching at unsupported convictions on matters political, religious, and social, about which we can know nothing except what we interpret from our impaired position behind the curtain, everything mediated by the brain, everything adrift in the cosmos. This dark edged sentence appeared in a recent email from […]
Yield and Surrender
Yet another excerpt from the interview with Ted Kooser (see the post below as well) in Guernica magazine. This one is about yield: If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly […]
- Aesthetics
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Drift
We live in an age where pluralism and inclusiveness are the norm (Tea Party excluded), but disenfranchising divisions are still occurring. Music, visual art, poetry, prose, architecture—all the artistic métiers have within their creative borders a whole slew of tribes that speak their own patois. Look at the language barrier that exists between two people […]
- Aesthetics
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Staggering Labor and Jolts of Luck
A vacant loft in Chelsea that we just happened upon recently. Ah, the provocation of empty space. It always excites my “if only!” energy. Often discussed, but still a furtive topic: How does an artist finds his or her voice? An identifiable style, that creative stride that becomes signatory? The search for that essence is […]
The Island Becoming the World
Robinson Crusoe Island Has it happened to you yet? Have the plethora of responses to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, worn your interest thin? If yes, then this isn’t for you. I am not yet finished observing and partaking of the phenom that is DFW, of the increasingly long shadow that has […]
- Aesthetics
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Smee Wins Pulitzer Prize
Sebastian Smee (Photo: Boston Globe) What great news—Sebastian Smee, art critic for the Boston Globe, has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Hats off! Smee is the first art writer at the Globe whose opinion has mattered to me. His reviews are carefully crafted and thoughtful. And as knowledgeable as he is about contemporary art, […]
Both/And
Emily Dickinson wrote, “My business is circumference.” What a wonderful image and phrase, and so Dickinsonian in its simple but powerful directness. (And what a master of the small she was. She described herself as “New Englandly”—her language pared down to essentials, her verses modest in size. As Barbara Novak points out, “Modesty and understatement […]