shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: poetry (Page 1 of 2)

In Autumn

yellow moon
	becomes
amber mum
	becomes
question of bridges that go nowhere
	becomes
smell of paper, hot out of the printer
	becomes 
something golden that 
was alive just yesterday
but today smells newly, richly dead.

First pub­lished in Door is a Jar 

Letter Home 4 Aug, 2018

Dear­est ones,

I went to a lec­ture last week. Ilya Kamin­sky, a famous Ukrain­ian poet, began by ask­ing “How is life on this shiny plan­et?” I did not know how to answer him. He taped pic­tures by Diego Rivera to the wall and read from Calvino’s  Invis­i­ble Cities. He spoke of how our work is always in con­ver­sa­tion with oth­ers and point­ed to two of my favorite artists. I was, all at the same time, utter­ly chuffed and in com­plete despair.  And I won­dered how am I ever going to find myself in the mid­dle of that con­ver­sa­tion? I remain a child stand­ing at the edge of the room watch­ing the adults play word games in a lan­guage that I am just learning.

Lat­er that after­noon while dri­ving down the hill to town I was over­come by a deep wave of homesickness.

Do you remem­ber the emp­ty lot in down­town? The one that is so deep? There is an apple tree down there. Filled with lit­tle green apples — green apples that are about to ripen, many have red shoul­ders already. Some­how this does not seem hope­ful to me. I must be deranged in some way.

Between all that and the dis­ap­point­ing lemon cake… well you can imag­ine my state of mind.

 

Yrs affec­tion­ate­ly, L

I Believe (after Ron Shelton)

I believe in the image, the line, the stan­za, the iambic foot, the per­fect word. Asso­nance, slant rhymes, that the for­mal forms still have a place in mod­ern poet­ry. I believe that Shake­speare wrote the plays. I believe in a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment out­law­ing poet­ry about poet­ry and the use of the word “suf­fuse.” I believe in revi­sion, inter­lin­ear trans­la­tions, pub­lish­ing in print — not on-line, and I believe in long, slow, deep, wet poems that last three days. 

Morning Linkage (Oct 5)

Transportation

The most won­der­ful vehi­cle in the world (accord­ing to sev­er­al of my friends) is the VW bus. In this case, the icon­ic split-window ver­sion with com­pa­ny logos and colors.

Nice visu­al wrap up to the Can­non­ball Endurance Ral­ly. (Vin­tage bikes)

Mov­ing a lit­tle faster. This video teach­es you “How to Lean on a BMW S1000RR” The lack of steer­ing head move­ment (except when pulling the clutch) is aston­ish­ing. (Video)

IP

Righthaven, a name that you nev­er want to see on an enve­lope in today’s mail. The single-purpose copy­right enforce­ment law firm has final­ly offered up the per­fect (?) case for the EFF to test the lim­its of fair-use in the web.

Art, Images, and Design

All our stuff. In the 1990’s Peter Men­zel made a series of pho­tographs for a book about all our stuff. 30 fam­i­lies out­side their homes will all their pos­ses­sions around them. Mate­r­i­al World: A Glob­al Fam­i­ly Por­trait. (NPR gives 12 of the orig­i­nal 30 por­traits.) And now two Chi­nese pho­tog­ra­phers have repeat­ed the exer­cise for the diverse regions of China.

High Def isn’t just for TV. Hal­taDefinizione. HAL9000 uses new tech to pro­duce incred­i­bly detailed images of old pic­tures. Stun­ning. Read about the tech­nol­o­gy here. Look at the images here (in Ital­ian — just click on stuff you’ll be fine.)

A1One has been work­ing the streets of Tehran for quite a while now. This lim­it­ed edi­tion of prints com­bines tra­di­tion­al Per­sian cal­lig­ra­phy and his own sig style.  I also admire his recy­cling of used spray cans.

time to fix more borken stuff,

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