Seven Metaphors

Teachers are great sharers—or show-offs, depending on how you look at it—and often compare the clever and cruel tasks they’ve given students. In the summer, all of these assignments float up, borne as by some ocean current to my desert island, and I plot ways to use them.
An obstetric nursing teacher once told me [...]

Naming Stuff

Lately I’ve been thinking every poem I write could begin with the words, “Well yes and…” and, in fact, those words may make a good title if I can ever get a book together.
They suggest that what follows will acknowledge, affirm, and supplement what a reader already knows, which seems to be all I can [...]

A Match Ill-Met

Many writers and painters and creative people of all types say they don’t want their thinking to outdo their doing. Minimal self-consciousness is their goal, and they don’t want to be distracted by matters outside the work. Let the particulars of style and technique take care of themselves, they mean to focus on [...]

A Eulogy for George Carlin

Perhaps my favorite George Carlin routine was his rant on “stuff.” As was often the case in his routines, he starts by alerting his audience to the absurdity of something and then, in a torrent of repetitions and distinctions, overwhelms you. By the end, he exhausts the word… and sometimes you.
Others are more [...]

Too Able

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World includes a character named Helmholtz Watson, a eugenic specimen so perfect his superiors describe him as “able, perhaps too able.” All of the novel’s main characters have imperfections, but Watson’s may be the most interesting, as he is a writer and thus in the position to suggest Huxley’s view of [...]

Messages from Trouble

The blog category I least like checking is “angst,” yet angst has always been one of the chief motives behind my writing.
I’m not proud to say so. If I’m absolutely honest, I’d much rather read work that—at least sometime—promises mild weather instead of future storms, earthquakes, and suffering. The writer who relies [...]

Hypnagogia*

As you walk among us,
in the flat sun of an overcast day,
you throw no shadow. You carry it
with you, drawing light
from everything you pass near.
The world pales.
Ink drawn from pages, you paint
absence onto day. Every face
resists sight. When, unseen, the sun
slips in its climb, you feel it
and cry its hidden name. This [...]

Transcription of the Absurd

You’re not doing well. The mirror dims, and more objects are extinct to light. You think what fades here blazes elsewhere, furnishing another world’s illumination.
This avenue of shadows falls from the overhanging brows of teachers you’ve forgotten. Their motion has stilled to the palsy of atoms. Having mislaid the names [...]

Not Crazy Enough

“Much madness is divinest sense,” said Emily Dickinson, and Theodore Roethke wrote, “What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?”
We like our poets a little crazy, or, if not crazy, at least conflicted about circumstances that restrain less noble souls. To foil readers’ expectations and deny them complacency, a poet [...]

Abstracting Abstraction

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper
Last week, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Edward Hopper show. I’ve long admired Hopper’s paintings. His city scenes exude narrative mystery, and even his Gloucester homes and Maine [...]