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 [...]

Writer’s Block

The friction of traffic
wears deep, digging
inescapable grooves,
and this morning the city
looks like an underlayer,
a landscape exposed
by abrasion, carved
from what might swell
without me. The world
sinks exhausted,
spent from carrying
all I’ve taken from it.

Lazy Is As Lazy Does

“Lazy” is a much more slippery term than it ought to be. What passes as fruitful activity can just stand in the way of what you really should be doing, and sometimes doing nothing produces positive results. Sometimes, whether you are doing something or nothing is a matter of interpretation.
For the last few days, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

King Ego, Part 78

At the end of her memoir Black Ice, Lorene Carey recalls sitting through commencement and awards as one of the first African-American graduates of St. Paul’s and wondering whether she would receive an award, whether she would do any more than simply graduate.
She feels a “greedy girl” roiling inside her and silently asks when [...]