What is seen in a season of darkness
We are seized by the yellow light of the fading afternoon: the way the islands flame before the setting sun. Here is winter, but there is light. Continue reading What is seen in a season of darkness
Category: poetry
When we [will] have [been] remembered
Most days, water holds the light. Why then have even the puddles turned bleak? Continue reading When we [will] have [been] remembered
Sound Collaboration–To listen for the shapes of words
Recently someone–a student who is also a colleague– sent me a list of words that begins with the word collaboration and ends with the word crisis. The list is a request for a collaboration as well as a compilation of many of the varieties of chaos, computational and not, introduced into our lives by COVID-19–or more precisely, by our confounding, cranky, critical and community responses to COVID-19. Continue reading Sound Collaboration–To listen for the shapes of words
Songs of an anxious mind
No doubt about it, I’m having trouble doing my work. Trouble getting things done. Trouble sleeping. Trouble waking. How my eyes ache. And my joints. My heart feels funny. It is as if neither my eyes nor my brain can focus–as if the frame glitches and slips just a little, the visible world doubling at the edges. Continue reading Songs of an anxious mind
Bodies in Pain–on hurting and being hurt
Like so many since the Nova Scotia massacre in mid April, I have been having nightmares, and am often awake during the night. This terrible event has awakened all the old traumas…When I do finally sleep, waking each morning is like crashing into a low wall. I am editing a poem I had begun to draft before the massacre called Elimination Round about big game hunting in Mexico and its relationships to tourism and other forms of collecting, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of missing and murdered in Mexico these last few years, and I can hardly face it. The spent metal casings of .223 rounds are a debris field scattered behind and before us, the horror of so many lives lost and hearts broken a scorching flare turning the hours to ash. Continue reading Bodies in Pain–on hurting and being hurt
Not sailing to Byzantium: on poetry in a time of crisis
No one sleeps the night through anymore. The wings of endings beat near our faces, drop bones into our dreams….But let us understand that we too will die, each of us; and that in our time of living it matters to reach out and to speak up against the increasing number of state gestures that threaten to become excessive force, surveillance and foreclosures of civil liberties. It matters to ask questions, and to try to conduct serious civil debate about the best routes to sound judgment and care. It matters to take time to listen to what the non-human parts of the planet are saying, as dolphins roll through Venice, and the air clears over Delhi and other industrial centres. It matters to reimagine our entitlements and travel plans, our airplanes and global expansions. What does a sustainable economy look like? Whom should it serve? What would it take to build it, and to engage both human and non-human actors? Why shouldn’t artists and poets study such things? Continue reading Not sailing to Byzantium: on poetry in a time of crisis
Late January blues
Winter is far from done. Still, we are waiting./ For what? Not for whispers or intimations; /not for inspiration, but for accident–/ Continue reading Late January blues
Nightwatches
I think about how the night sky never looks quite the same from season to season or if you’ve shifted a few degrees of latitude or longitude. It’s as if, when you travel, someone has rearranged the furniture of the firmament. Continue reading Nightwatches
The Silence of the Songbirds
How can we attend to what we have not noticed? It took a week or ten days for the strangeness of the silence that surrounded us as we walked in the forest to become audible, to realize that it was not what we were hearing but what we were not hearing that was what was important. The realization didn’t come all at once. Continue reading The Silence of the Songbirds
The quick and the dead
As winter recedes we find bones along the beach. The dog gnaws some of them, but not the coyote skull with its long canines and nasal passages packed with a delicate fretwork of turbinates. Continue reading The quick and the dead
Visible Poetry 