“Let me put it baldly. The two halves are: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE” –Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” It seems extravagant, suddenly, or maybe merely perverse, to concern oneself with the philosophy behind how to write poetry, i.e., a poetics, […]
I wish I could ignore it all and live a life of relative peace. But I can’t look away. Within a few days, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump missed his skull by a half inch, further burnishing his heroic martyrdom with his base; his self-appointed judge threw out his stolen documents case, based on […]
The profoundly dispiriting spectacle of the Biden-Trump debate, featuring a dottering old man who struggled to finish his sentences or stay on topic vs. a highly energized old man who lied relentlessly to the point of psychosis and often couldn’t be bothered with any topic except immigration, had to be a low point in my […]
What I write in this space amounts to the kinds of things that preoccupy me, and lately I’ve been preoccupied by love—romantic love. It’s not because the new Taylor Swift album just came out (though it does play its part in this), predominantly a slow burn weighted heavily on the agonies rather than the ecstasies. […]
Melodious Funk writing a language nobody cares about much less speaks in a little corner of the unknown universe we cling to it we’re proud of it we even think there’s some reason to preserve it & so we keep on writing as if somebody’s going to read it hello out there As I’m one […]
Five to six days a week, I think about prisons. In fact, I go to a desk in an office, and sit down with a pile of mail sent from prisons around the United States (and sometimes from other countries as well). I respond to help them with their lives, however I reasonably can, mainly […]
I’ve written blogs on the Israeli-Hamas conflict, translating tantric poetry, photography as dharma art, the Denver Nuggets, prairie dogs, Hugh Hefner, recognizing ordinary mind, and a shamanic journey to extirpate the karma of the atomic bomb, but what by far got the most reaction was my review of Taylor Swift’s concert movie (Taylor Swift: The […]
At our organization, Mindfulness Peace Project, where I work as the “Co-Executive Director,” the lion’s share of what we do consists of helping prison inmates to learn dharma. This has resulted in some cases in many year relationships with people I’ve never directly met, done entirely through writing personal letters and commenting on […]
The enduring interest in any artistic production, as I started to address in the previous post, remains a hard thing to pin down, as much as critics might monumentalize it. Why this photo comes to the fore and not that one–I don’t necessarily have a language to describe it. That’s the most interesting thing. […]
A fundamental element to my practice of taking pictures, particularly of the natural world, comes from the perceptual sense that I could take a thousand pictures standing in one spot—that everything I see constitutes an organic artfulness that doesn’t require fashioning. What the eye can see has […]
