August 2011
1 post
1 tag
June 2011
2 posts
May 2011
2 posts
why writers drink →
Being a real writer isn’t about how much you write in a day or how many books you’ve published. It’s about how big your liver is.
April 2011
1 post
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I’ll admit I’ve loved some things deemed less than perfect. On a patio, pinning flowers to a dress form while the tide isn’t coming. Or on a street corner, arms flapping, with a few crumpled tissues and a half-peeled orange until my fingers and hands get blurry. Nothing is indestructible. Not the sky, not the parking lot it bathes in weird, fluorescent green. Not that I’m complaining,...
March 2011
1 post
January 2011
2 posts
i'm not making this up
Jacques Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman…
JD: I am not an “Ornette Coleman expert,” but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus there is a repetition, in the work, that is intrinsic to the initial creation—that which...
2 tags
a new poem
From 6.00 to 6.45 A.M. after a painting by Ross Bleckner
the moon coming down how morning looks from a day’s wrong end If I really died, you said, I’m sure you’d find some brilliance in it fingertips pressed to shut eyelids I have the dreams, but I don’t make them in this prologue to a trillion particles we are shadowless as we imagined peering toward a layer of universe behind the...
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
2 posts
August 2010
1 post
1 tag
A Sympathy, A Welcome
Feel for your bad fall how could I fail, poor Paul, who had it so good. I can offer you only: this world like a knife. Yet you’ll get to know your mother and, humourless as you do look, you will laugh and all the others will not be fierce to you, and loverhood will swing your soul like a broken bell deep in a forsaken wood, poor Paul, whose wild bad father loves you well.
-John Berryman
June 2010
2 posts
1 tag
Watcha long-time hero of mine.
April 2010
2 posts
i lived this view nearly every day for a year.
now it’s disappearing and there’s a live webcam of the demolition.
perhaps if i had simply heard, from a distance, that the silos had come down - or had i visited some future day and found them gone - maybe i wouldn’t be so sentimental about it.
but something about being in that view again, and watching it come apart piece by...
March 2010
1 post
January 2010
5 posts
i love these beautifully reproduced florentine posters from Hollanders. We’ve got the one above in the entry to the house and just these carrots below for the kitchen. The best part, they’re only $4.
sometimes i feel funny taking pictures of my food. but i do it anyway.
this time i tried my hand at preserving my own lemons. preserved lemons are a staple ingredient in north african cuisine and are made by made by being packed in salt and their own juices for at least a month.
during the first week of last december i pulled out a ball jar and followed a process like this one, not completely...
300&65 ampersands →
the pelican project →
i like this.
one book, many readings →
Completely blown away by this beautifully designed breakdown of the choose your own adventure books of my childhood.
September 2009
2 posts
1 tag
new poem
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how many things do you want to return to? cities apartments loves
for a long time I wanted every place I had lived to disappear
too many memories re-folded into someone else’s
like paper
we saw a whole building pulled skyward one night waves of phosphorescence pulsing
flames are just versions of falling water sucked backwards
versions of light
I had never seen a house on fire
the...
Prelude. Scriabin.
consider this to be back in...
April 2009
2 posts
March 2009
15 posts
1 tag
new poem
I was invited to read this poem today at the grand re-opening of the UM Museum of Art. Written for a reading of all ekphrastic poetry, it was inspired by a slightly-wonkier (but even more beautiful, in my opinion) version of THIS scultpure by Louise Bourgeois (which is currently on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts), and from which the poem takes its title.
The Blind Leading the Blind
...
pretty.
sylvain chauveau - fly like a horse
1 tag
lucky
My mother is finally returning back to work on Monday after her heart-valve replacement in January. Eager to spend a bit of time with her before she gets busy again, I headed back to GR on Friday to see my folks. Friday evening was spent with my mother at the newly expanded Grand Rapids Art Museum, which I recently learned is the world’s first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental...
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tiny poets
In my dream when I woke up I saw a pig laying on my lap and I pushed the pig off my lap and I ran out the door and I shut it hard and I got my skateboard and rode on it and I jumped over the dog and the dog tried to reach my skateboard and it fell and the pig tripped and I went to the store and I saw all the people were green. I love Miss H so much.
SPRING IS EVERYTHING! I’m...
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new work
-or- why i started this silly thing in the first place.
SPRING, I THOUGHT YOU’D COME BACK “Oh shit / she said. / Whose is this? / I just might / have to / drink / some of it.” Long-awaited diversionary – many thanks for the next fifteen-or-so minutes. In them we will blink at that impalpable equation delineating almost everything. Except the feeling of having remembered what you’d...
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from Harper's: "Woman in Rose Dress" by Diane... →
Her sex worries will be discussed when people worry what happened to her at the end of her life when her chin droops and when her eyes are hooded. Not yet. Her energy and her youth irritate her, for they provide a sort of permanent entry into a shop. She lifts a bouquet of broccoli rabe. Oh, how awful it is! “I don’t know how to cook these. Do you cook the leaves?”
The man says, “You chop off the...
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NOW I AM READING: Louise Bourgeois, Drawings &...
“I do like this very much. It is two things that balance. It is the toi and the moi. The arrow means the direction that you give your life.”
“Whatever you do today will be positive or negative. Every day you take a chance and you don’t win every time. Sometimes you get into a terrific fight. All during the day you have to be careful that you play the right game. For me, these pluses and minses...
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more kidz poemz
Weather by Jazz B., Grade 1
I wonder about weather. Why? Because thunderstorms and hurricanes. Because thunder and lightning. Because what? Which weather has thunderstorms? Maybe weather some storms? Pick a volcano weather. The end of weather things?
How to Ride a Bike by Cariyana P., Grade 1
when I ride a bike I love to ride a bike boom boom boom boom when I ride a bike I’m happy happy...
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"Wiggle Room," by David Foster Wallace →
“This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt. This made the routing desk at UPS look like a day at Six Flags.”
February 2009
15 posts
1 tag
Julie Doiron - Consolation Prize
(thanks to...
2 tags
The Science of Food: Harold McGee interviewed in... →
Harold McGee’s comprehensive scientific analysis of food, taste, and cooking, On Food and Cooking, is one of my biggest obsessions! There’s a taste of McGee’s magic in this month’s The Believer.
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from Harper's: "Curtain calls: The fever called... →
Loving this beautiful language: “The biochemistry of friendship can be equally a mystery, unlike perhaps infatuation, which makes evolutionary sense when it leads to copulation, or brown-nosing ingratiation, which may prove almost as advantageous. We need allies and thus want friends too, an evolutionist could say. But some friendships are just useful for empathy, not promotion or...
Crystal Stilts - Prismatic Room
2 tags
kid poemz
Space Aliens with Creature by Antonio D., Grade 1 The aliens come from space to our planet. The monster came from under the ground. The aliens and monsters teamed up. Now they help us.
Nonsense by Jazz B., Grade 1 Bark bark bark! Nonsense means you can make silly cows. Change by DaShania N., Grade 1 I wonder why everything has changed. Why? Why? Why? Everything has changed so...
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