What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Capitalism, which continues to devour the living world that we need as our home and to consume the hours of everyone’s lives for the profit of the very few, setting people against each other for the mere preservation of life and pressurizing gendered and racialized forms of oppression. There’s no writing without time, without air to breathe and potable water, without a body and earth that supports life, without each other.
Ten Questions for Anne Boyer
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i tire myself out
pretending to have a body.
everyone worships feelings
they don’t have names for
but no one is talking about it.
love is a burning house we built from
scratch.
love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.
Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Ode to Northern Alberta”
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Randomly missing my long-dead grandparents. OK well three of them. (But also honoring the memory of the one I don’t miss.) Between my ancestor reverence and my Daoist tendencies, I clearly should’ve been a Chinese peasant.
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Ravens are always trying to bullshit you. One just drifted high overhead without flapping its wings, croaking HAWK…HAWK…HAWK. (2 May)
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Can you really say you've read a book if you haven't gone through all this in the process? pic.twitter.com/VWyetsWMfp
— Into The Forest Dark (@ElliottBlackwe3) May 2, 2022
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How long will earth
hold me in its tender mouth? I count backwards
from 100. An orange cat weasels by. Robins
scrap over a rosehip. I have no idea what I’m counting.
Lance Larsen, “Two Horses in a Field in Mid-December”
***
Perhaps it’s fitting that modern masters of haiku in English are unknown even to most of the already tiny minority of Americans who read poetry. Humility, I’m coming to recognize, is absolutely central to the art. As soon as you think you know more than the haiku, it’s over. You’ve written a senryu at best.
***
The uneven stanzas in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are simply cata strophic.