one of David Nemeth's poetry teachers was Bill Knott. would love to read what David has to say about this poet.

I've been reading Knott for years with a mixture of envy and mystification. he is master of form, and feels himself so out of the mainstream he frequently self-publishes his work. for more info check out Richard Hell's essay. and yet, I've recently read somewhere Knott's next book is due out from FSG next year.

I do not agree with Silliman that FSG published Jeff Clark's newest book because FSG wouldn't know experimental writing should it bite them on their asses. FSG is free to publish whomever they wish. I've not read Clark's latest book, though I think Clark is an interesting writer based on my reading of his first book.

but I wonder what's next from FSG, should they go ahead and publish Knott, who is next? Knott proudly wears the cloak of an underground misfit, but he has been well-published these past thirty-odd years, the most recent is Laugh at the End of the World (Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999) BOA Editions, 2000. the book is a brilliant collection of caustic poems from a writer who does not neatly fit into any categories.

spent the long weekend writing little but reading much, and thinking of Tom's questions on writing poetry, as well as Crag Hill's questions re: reading poetry. for I do think both are woven together so thoroughly that one doesn't exist without the other, for the most part, I mean. and I love reading other writers' responses, that is one of the reasons I am attracted to blogs and interviews of writers. and these are the questions I often ask of writers.

I've often heard and read writing has saved a person's life, and that reading and writing are the acts of living, a simple equation writing + reading = living. I believe that whole-heartedly, why else pursue an art no one else seems to give a shit about.

I reread all the time. often I pick up a book to read a few pages or poems before heading out the door for work, or before bed, or when I get up in the morning, etc. etc. in fact, caught myself last night thinking of Tom Raworth so when Anna and I got home last night around midnight I picked up an anthology with a few Raworth poems and read them standing in my undies before turning out the houselights and heading for bed.

and I usually read from front to back, but when I reread, or when I pick up a book in a bookstore or library I read from back to front. have no idea why, just feels comfortable that way.

I do not write everyday. but I do carry around a moleskin notebook Anna bought for me to jot down notes, lines, ideas or copy down sections of the books I am reading. I carry that notebook in a black backpack along with the books I am currently reading, I read about seven books at a time, and a couple of print journals. and I read a lot online, when I am fascinated by a certain writer, lately that writer is Jen Hofer, I will google him/her.

and for the political impact of reading and writing? I've paraphrased Brodsky before, I'll do so now: for civilization we are probably fucked, but for the individual there always remains a chance.

for reading/writing, to some writers at least, that includes me, is a matter of life and death. they are part of the same continuum of life and death. they are actions that give and receive extreme pleasure for the writer, for the reader.

a book I reread every now and again is Nice To See You (Homage To Ted Berrigan) ed. by Anne Waldman (Coffee House Press, 1991). it was a lucky find at a remaindered bookstore nearly 10 years ago. what is remarkable, to me, about this book is not only the memories, poems, essays, drawings and paintings contributed by the writers and artists who knew and loved Berrigan, but especially the photos of big Ted from the early 60s up towards a few days before his criminally premature death. Berrigan had one hell of a mug on him.

there are many candid shots but my favorite of the group is a family portrait of Berrigan, Alice Notley, Anselm and Edmund in their St. Marks Place flat in 1982. it is remarkable that each person in that photo is a very good poet. Big Daddy Berrigan is in bed with his blanket pulled up to his chest with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, sleepy-looking. and his family is on an equal plane with B. as they pose for the picture. here is a detail I dig: the millennium falcon is visible just behind Anselm's left shoulder.

but why should I dig a photo of another family? the same reason I love looking at pictures of favorite writers, and the fact that I soon will have my own family. the photo reminds me the acts of reading and writing move in synchronicity with the art of living.

corny, and silly worry about family life and the life of a writer? yeah, agreed it is, but it is a worry nonetheless. photos of writers are less biography but a kind of poem in of themselves. the viewer brings to it what he/she needs to discover.

always trying to educate myself re: elementary subjects. writers are to a large degree, I think, auto-didacts. for me school always got in the way from learning. spent most of my time at university shuffling in the stacks of the library where one discovery of a writer/writing leads to another.

thanks to visual poet Geof Huth's wonderful blog dbqp I've been paying closer attention to visual/concrete poems. last night I was looking up everything I could on Canadian visual poet jwcurry.

I still have much to learn, though I would not characterize visual and concrete poets "elementary", the word I used as an intro to this ramble, at all. but I wonder how a visual poet like Huth thinks of tattoos. could tattoos be considered visual poetry?

where I live, and I suspect in all cities of all sorts this is the same, I see many, many individuals inked. and some of them are absolutely fascinating. it is hard not to stare, for I often get caught trying to examine the work on a person only to have that person, say we are standing at a corner waiting to cross the street, give this look like what the fuck are you staring at?

but some persons have combined text and images that are a form of poetry. one guy I see all the time walking to and fro has thin lines of text, I think in English, start on each wrist and swirls upward under the sleeves of his t-shirt. and I wanna ask him what is it there written.

but the best tattoo I've seen was on a guy several years ago in line at the check-out in the local supermarket. he was an attractive man with short, neat hair just going grey, slim but tall and nicely dressed. I noticed his hands, for he had beautiful hands: like a surgeon's or pianist. and on his ring finger of his left hand was a red band delicately tattooed. I think it was a wedding band of a kind. it was the perfect counterpoint to his dress.

Spooky Spooky

this movie shot on a shoestring
by lucio fulci
ca. 1983
baby if be thou
the spookiest
I am the spectre
nothing have I
though here may be tygers
tried to kiss my own ass
but could never shorten the distance
everyday is Halloween
_______________________
dopo Tom Beckett

spooky is an ambient word. conjures many meanings/feelings. strangeness and strange, how word(s) connect: for the past week I've been listening, at my desk at work, to Spooky by Lush.

angels no in writing
writing in no angels

no writing in angels
writing no in angels

reading Mark Young's brilliant meditation on the Southern Boobook, and crows, recalls my seeing a crow yesterday morning walking on the way to work. it was playing, yes playing, in the grass right when the sprinklers turned off. it was dipping its head into the wet, rolling its body, and I swear I saw pure pleasure shine in its eyes.

and this winter past Anna found a hurt crow on our porch screaming in pain and confusion. when I got home she had the crow cozy with a towel in a little cardboard box in the room I am now typing in. we called an animal rescue service who advised not feeding it, only give it space and water, and to bring the crow to their hospital in the morning. we named the crow MacGuffin. when I awoke the next morning Anna told me she went to check on MacGuffin to find him strong and alert. she opened the door to the backyard, lifted the towel off the box, and BAM! MacGuffin was off like a shot, back to its normal self.

MacGuffin circled the house a couple of times and flew out of sight. I like the idea of MacGuffin returning to his world with tall stories of a strange room.

there are a number of very good Canadians writers I've been reading, both online and in print for the past year or two. one is rob mclennan, whose work was a serendipitous discovery last year when I found one of his books on the poetry shelf of a local bookstore. the other is ryan fitzpatrick, whose blog I found sometime ago. I'll write of mclennan later but now I'll discuss fitzpatrick, a poet whose work should be better known here in the States.

for the past year or so I've been reading ryan fitzpatrick's blog process documents with pleasure. he is part of a thriving community of Calgary writers and I check out his blog at least once a day. don't know him personally so I hope he doesn't mind my writing of him, and quoting this bio he recently posted:

"Poet *Ryan Fitzpatrick* spends his days as a grade school teacher and nights as a literary crusader. With books in his satchel and a gleam in his glasses, he fights literary apathy through support, promotion, and editing for filling Station magazine!"

fitzpatrick brings forth a great excitement and vigor to his writing, poems, reviews, miscellany, that for me, is a great good pleasure. I do not know if he has published any chaps or books but I look forward to everything he does.

check out his angry letter to an alternative weekly and see what I mean, this guy's got it!

but it is the high voltage found in his lines that compel me to visit his blog. there are a great number of subjects fitzpatrick writes about, a few of these are social theory, pop culture, other writers and the process of writing. he finds his language messy and in large chunks. his poems are less painterly, or cinematic, but at least to my ear and eye, made of those materials Oldenburg used when he created his pieces. if that sounds like an odd comparison, keep in mind the task of the poet is not merely to make it new, as Uncle Ez said, but to start over and over again, from the beginning, like Oldenburg when creating his pop art out of the very ancient traditions of painting and sculpture: ask: now what, let me begin.

I'll end this ramble with his poem recently published on his blog. again I hope fitzpatrick doesn't mind my posting it here. but I dig it and hope you do too. find his stuff and read on, brothers and sisters:

The New Poem - fifth sketch


A potential conflict, or
a dysfunctional canpo. We
were sad when
shelves empty. Dude, or
a pulp headache. Gulp, or
oulp. Scrabble, or scrubble.
Wait, it's an option I want
to bubble up to. Soapy
line, or loamy stanza. Down to
earth, a poem with spiffy
pants, or machete. Stop
discovering stuff, would you,
I mean, dud, or
kaboom. Nope,
no kaboom. An aspirin as
compositional rigour.
A stigma, or a cigarette, or
triple word score. A ten point
poem. From outside the key,
these sneaks is ice cold. Ouch,
my knee. What if the fork
is paved? I mean
gold plated, or statement.

poetry exists in the spaces, those interstices between language, object and event. and yet it is to the language, capital L, to which we write, at least for me.

to use a phrase from Obi-Wan Kenobi, language is the force, it is what binds and energizes the human being. there can be no truths or falsehoods without it. and yet, language is an abstraction, which blocks the way to absolute knowledge.

but is there absolute knowledge? does absolute evil and absolute good exist in our reality. to live in the world is to live in reality, however one wishes to define it.

can language embody these absolutes if they are shown to exist at all? or perhaps, they exist in the realm of equations: cold, beautiful, but not carnate.

Stevens reminds us: Reality is the base, but it is only the base. and Olson tell us the poem is a high energy construct got from the poet via language from there over to here.

and so:

each new discovery of a poet is a cause for celebration. for me reading gets the blood pumping, I mean there is a physical reaction at work when I read the good stuff.

and there is much to be found everywhere, especially aetherized on the Internet. I've come to computers in a very uneven way. I recall doing my schoolwork at the computer lab on campus and printing out my papers, and poems, on an old dot matrix printer. I recall seeing the Internet for the first time in 1991 when a roommate subscribed to Prodigy. it was all black and white text, if I recall correctly.

but now there is a community created by writers via the net that transcends time zones via blogs and online journals. it is a great good that I can read writers from China, the Philippines, Canada, Morroco, Australia etc. etc. via my computer.

all this is terribly obvious, I know. I've made some brilliant discoveries, for I am first a reader, then I am a writer. I am firmly convinced a writer is first a reader and falls in love all the time when he/she finds the good stuff, however you wish to define it.

and so I love correspondence. should you be so inclined please email me, I want to hear from you. everyone gets spam that advertises things such as the best way to meet singles, or how to increase penis length, or how to score Viagra etc. etc. so identify your greeting with the name of the blog, or use the words, poet or poetry. I have not got any spam with poet or poetry as the tag line.

shine on you crazy diamonds.

I've added Mark Young's blog Pelican Dreaming and his poetry blog Series Magritte to the links. read on, dudes and dudettes!

the life of a poet? I dunno, but for me the the day began at 11:00 am (you can tell I ain't a morning person, more like a middle of the night kinda guy), walk the dogs, a little shopping for supplies, stopped at Tower Books and bought The Little Door Slides Back by Jeff Clark (reissued by FSG 2004), a little yard work and tonight for dinner vegetarian pizza. yeehaw!

politically engaged art troubles me not because I dislike it but because I wonder how efficacious it is at motivating the listener/viewer/reader.

this afternoon I stopped by one of my favorite used bookstores, Beer's Books, located right across the state Capital, ya know, where President Terminator has taken up residence. I bought From Act Up to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, ed. by Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduck, Verso 2002. and evidence of this book gives me hope that we, early 21st Century citizens, can and will use our collective power to change bad policies and corporate malfeasance. the anti-war protests last year was a sure shot of adrenaline. I recall the anti-war protest at the Capital last year had an attendance of around 10,000 to 15,000 people, though official records claimed a number, if I recall correctly, of 5,000 individuals. something, it felt like, was happening, and perhaps this bent administration might just listen up. but they didn't of course and now, well. . .

but when I got home I watched an old video of U2 doing their great song, "Sunday Bloody Sunday." wonderful, powerful stuff, and yet the pessimist in me thought all the kids in the audience wants to do is rock. so much for changing the world for the better.

so the power of art: perhaps, as one writer said, as for our civilization we are doomed, but for the individual there remains a chance.

I grew up on punk rock, real, loud, obnoxious, nihilistic stuff. there was an energy and real pathos in it, for example when Johnny Rotten (and sometimes John Lydon) spat about the Berlin Wall: I'm looking over the wall/And they are looking at me! The Sex Pistols' politics was found in the the zeroes, those luminous absences created by individuals who have nothing in a wealthy country. it ain't for nothing punk band names were negatives: D.O.A, Black Flag, X, Social Distortion . . .

and so for political art: perhaps we in the USA are not so politicized anyway. a couple of years ago a painter friend came back from the SFMOMA with its catalogue of contemporary Latin American art. almost all of it was overtly political/sociological/scatological, even. and a lot of the pieces had much to do with the human body, its form, excretions and so on. we don't do much of that. it seems we have a fear of the body and its functions. is it related to our fear of political activism? I know this might sound rather hippie-ish of me, but I do think learning to love is much harder than hate. and political art must engage in acts of love. We do love and we do die, not we must love each other or die, and so we are finite, everything is, which is the greater argument to act in loving. right? what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding.

been a long enervating day at work. so the evening calls for a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream (cuz I need my strength, and there are not three words in the English language more terrifying than, SUDDEN WEIGHT LOSS) and to wash it down with a couple of cold Guinness. I dig the vino poetics of Ms. Chatelaine, but for me make mine brew poetry.

Anna picked me up from work tonight so we can grab a quick bite in a little Mexican restaurant at the local mall. and after dinner we walked across the mezzanine to see what's to see at Barnes & Noble. like every writer I'm addicted to bookstores and duck into almost every one I find, including a Barnes & Noble.

and as a character said to Tom Cruise in the movie Risky Business, Sometimes Joel you have to say what the fuck. so Anna and I browsed the periodicals.

all this is a roundabout way of saying sometimes good things pop up in the least places. for example I bought the recent issue of 580 Split primarily because it contained two poems by Rodney Koeneke, a wild poet I've seen only online. and there are other sterling writers in here as well, like Sara Veglahn. such a find, and pleasantly surprised to find the journal on the racks at the BN.

I've added a few more links. read and read: it's all good!

Tom, tonight re: sex and death, I'm a'drinking and a'thinking.

I've had one major run-in with insomnia in my life nearly 18 years ago. it was pure hell stemming partly from a prolonged depression and other myriad difficulties in my life. to say it was pure hell is a major understatement.

I've read somewhere that depression, and other attendant mental illnesses, are an occupational hazard for writers. I dunno, but certainly writers are not immune to depression. perhaps it is considered an occupational hazard for writers because writers have ready access to communicable language. writers can speak to others of pain and misery.

guess I'm thinking about this openly because tonight I am exhausted and sick of the atrocities broadcast tonight on the evening news re: Iraq. just turned off CNN after watching the talking heads bicker and prattle over all this shit. one feels absolutely helpless at times, many times, sometimes all the time.

and yet, earlier today at work I'd been thinking of music as a transcendent force in our lives. last night, after reading a little, writing a little and eating a whole bunch, I turned on the TV to watch CNN and instead found myself captivated by some old concert footage of The Grateful Dead on VH1. now, I ain't a deadhead by any means, though I have friends who are, and this is no slight on The Dead's music or its fans.

I don't recall the song and I'm guessing the band was in SF, perhaps at The Fillmore, though it could've been any place. but the camera used crane shots of the dancing crowd and then would cut to two or three individual faces during the performance. and this man: long hair with a thin leather headband, handlebar moustache and wearing a light brown vest: his face was pure ecstasy. the kind of transportive pleasure that comes when you love the band, love the songs and watching/listening to the band play at the first intensity. it was riveting to watch the crowd, and this man in particular. though The Dead was pop it was art at its highest level: emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually acute.

and hopefully, we have all been there with that man watching/listening to a beloved band and/or musician: it is the level of art Oppen refers to when he says:

One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads
in his hands,
He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art

and of course art is more than to make our lives bearable, and even, if we are lucky sublime. what to make of it, all of it, in these black times. . .

on names: my name, for these parts of the forest, Sacramento, is
very, very common: Richard Lopez. just this afternoon at the grocery store a friendly clerk always teases me by saying very slowly, Howdy Mr Lopez! it seems her boss has the same name.

the attraction of names is of course subjective. yesterday afternoon I had coffee with the poet James Den Boer and his wife Leah. we talked of our current reading, current writing, and the sounds of names. he mentioned a writer he thinks rather good, Jen Hofer. I agree she is quite good, and she has, to my ear, a wonderful name, solid, no nonsense, yet musical kind of name.

what's in a name? everything, I suppose but not quite. I think Jeff Clark is a very cool name, but someone else may think not. Ted Berrigan, whom I've always thought a wonderful writer, is also a very cool name. and of course I'm attracted to writers who have similar last names: there is for Jeff Clark, Tom Clark, and speaking of poetic Clarks there is of course, Clark Coolidge. Jen is an abbreviation for Jennifer, a common enough name for women born in the 1960s and 1970s. that doesn't detract from its beauty, at least for me.

I find when I read a journal online or in print I turn to names that sound most pleasing to my ear. but then there are names that grow on me. and I turn to those as well. exotic names, or plain, each writer finds him/herself a textual creature with the same name. and at first glance that name, the same one we live with everyday, may look and sound like an alien species. who is this Richard Lopez that has my name as well? for surely those poems I remember writing now in print no longer belong to me. they've become a different thing from those stages of composition to publication, and if lucky the poems might return the favor of being okay to other readers and wear the name of the writer like a good fitting coat.

and as for my name, eh? I recall walking home from work and seeing a street person about a block away mumbling to himself walking straight toward me. as I got closer he looked up and exclaimed Richard! (half-beat pause) Gere! I was slightly unerved wondering how he knew my name before I heard the second part. I don't think I look like the actor at all, perhaps the only thing Gere and I have in common is salt-and-pepper hair, though what the hell do I know, I can't see myself as others see me. but most street people I see going to and from work are local denizens that I have seen dozens of times. and they have seen me, for I must have the nickname Richard Gere among them cuz another time a different street person said, Hi Richard Gere as I walked past him.

I like Guinness in cold glass bottles.

I like taking really, really long walks where I disappear.

I like reading texts when I forget the division between reader and writer.

I like watching the cats doze or on high alert as they stare out the windows.

I like cool breezes and very blue air.

I like hot days when crickets sound an electric buzz.

I like the companionship of dogs and thier singular ability to live only in the present.

I like the hard-wrought verse of Lorine Neidecker.

for whom do we write? what about all this publishing? I've been thinking about Tom Orange's reply to Ron Silliman re: a superabundance of writing and not enough time. there ain't enough of it, time, at all but good writing finds its readers, should there be good readers.

I posit writers are first readers: and a readerly creature sniffs out its own kind, at first. then, by degrees, reading becomes larger and deeper until the readerly creature develops its habits of reading. and these habits are pure pleasure of every sort: physical (who hasn't experienced physical reaction to a text?), spiritual, intellectual, economical, etc. etc.

so Orange's remarks are twofold: first, a manifestation of despair (what, whom to read, will I be read in return?), and second, a very writerly concern about silence (when should a writer employ silence in his/her writing by not publishing?)

Orange asks no small questions re: WCW's "What about all this writing?" go on, I say, and ask, "What about all this reading?"

for me I'd rather have superabundance than a dearth in writing. enough despair about it, books have a way of finding their readers, for reading is a supreme pleasure.

the times are never propitious for writing and reading. it is miraculous that good, and even great, writing gets done and even read. but how does writing affect current politico-socio-economic darkness. everyone can quote Auden's "For poetry makes nothing happen." sure it makes nothing happen in the very real sense that what any poet writes will not change this administration's foreign policy.

but writing is made from our collective conscious/unconscious: language. and it is language that arguably creates the body politic, our cities, our culture, our history. by changing language, by different modes of writing, by including vastness and minutiae in our shared grammars, then we might be able to change consciousness. for the better?

I'm with Tom Beckett at his blog that it is important to write and read for pleasure and change: I like to read writing that makes me/want to write is a great place to begin to change, perhaps, for the better.

the best job ever for me was being a part-time janitor for Facilities Management of my old school back in the mid-90s. the job took only a couple of hours to do, and the rest of the time was devoted to reading and scribbling. I did a lot of scribbling then, not necessarily writing, but copying poems I loved trying to get to their essences, how they worked.

it was a night-time gig: 10:00 pm to 2:00 a.m. but the campus at the time was obviously devoid of any signs of life, except for the other custodians. the best place to work was the library, because I had the whole place to myself.

that job, and my next, working as the manager for a recycling center for a small non-profit, were absolutely indispensable, they were part of my apprenticeship, much more than the classes I was taking and the lectures I attended.

I do not mean school was not important to me, it was, but the time and solitude both those occupations afforded me were invaluable to my reading and writing. I learned much then and those jobs helped develop the habits and discipline I needed for wage-earning that take more time and energy from me.

but what would be the ideal job for a poet? teaching, carpentry, labor?

now that's something for the kiddies' X-Mas

I walk to work everyday, about 5 miles round trip. and as I get ready to leave for work this morning I wonder how poetry affects my day job. work, the kind we do for a steady income, has quite an impact on our reading and writing lives: loss of time and energy is only a couple of things. but working does have its benefits too, for example a wider exposure of vernaculars, friendships established among co-workers and so on, an independance from academe.

but how does all these things go re: my writing. surely my day job has some influence, much like my walking to and from work. in walking I can slow down long enough to meander, discover local architecture, talk with people, watch how individuals behave as they also walk and drive, check out my favorite bookstores. all these I know have influenced my writing: if not in subject matter than certainly in compositional methods. et tu?

to write = being outside
of language

yesterday at IKEA I saw a Buddhist monk
robed with shaved head

shopping (with someone shopping)
such movement of suchness

of the things of this world
language is/is not

reality
transforms it

I've been reflecting on community, the kind of community poets create and inhabit. and I agree with Ray Bianchi over at Postmodern Collage Poetry that there does exist a fraternity among poets. Bianchi also discusses pettiness and jockeying for positions among writers, but for the most part I do think poets, even if not on speaking terms, are brothers and sisters. our art collapses the barriers of time and space and even specific languages so that Catullus is my brother as Sappho is my sister.

I realize this is a conceit, perhaps, but a fruitful one. I can imagine Rimbaud or Oppen wondering what the hell I've written but even so nodding in agreement about the wonders and necessities of reading and writing. I think either old master would sit down with me over a coffee or a beer for a long passionate chat of our shared art.

and so it is among the living writers too. language is what unites, and divides, the veritable human being. being in love with grammar is already a great risk, but since we think in words, at least I do, it is a risk equal to that of great love. we may not see eye to eye on everything, hell what kind of world would that make if everyone was in agreement about everything. but writing and reading, at least to poets, is what expands human consciousness. there is no higher high to be had.

it feels like summer in Sacramento. the weather this weekend is hot. I mean real hot, upwards in the high 90s. and so when the weather turns hot like this I think of movies, summer movies, the kind of entertainment that used to be shown in matinee movie theaters and drive-ins before the advent of cable TV and DVDs etc. etc. ya know, mindless exploitation fare.

I love a good zombie flick. last night I watched the latest DVD presentation of George A. Romero's original Dawn Of The Dead for the third time this month. a classic that can't be beat.

and yet, and yet: last month the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead was a fucking stunner. I mean this film had me hooked the moment it started. I didn't expect the remake to be as good as it is. can't wait for its release on DVD and I can replay the opening sequence again and again.

ah, the textuality of digital cinema when a scene or moment or flashing image can be manipulated to slow down or stop for closer study.

and why do I love this type of cinema? probably has something to do with growing up in the 1970s and 80s when the Sacramento region had an abundance of one-screen theaters and drive-ins, each one specialized in a genre. and so there were drive-ins that showed Disney films, theaters that catered to midnight movies etc. etc. I watched them all with a relish that now manifests itself in DVDs such as Romero's low-budget masterpiece.

thank you very, very much Eileen.

"I loaf and invite my soul," is no mean exercise. every schoolchild can, or should be required, to recite at least one or two lines by Whitman. certainly this line by the Good Grey Poet should be a must for recitation by everyone. what the hell is everyone hurrying to anyway.

life is too short to be in such a hurry, but it is not long enough to follow a moron.

and today, after a 12 hr. sleep, I woke to take the dogs for their walk, did a little shopping with Anna, and now attempting to be as still as possible. it ain't easy, such laziness, more art than science, certainly. but it is absolutely necessary for any work to be done, especially poetic work. reading and writing, for me at least, requires as much stillness as I can muster. it takes time and practice and a lot of energy: a disciplined laziness? oh yeah!

Tom, the Silliman issue of The Difficulties arrived today. thank you, amigo.