The prospect of getting lost, physically or otherwise, has always terrified me. But I am coming to see that there is power in being lost. There is power in existing in a state of not-knowing, of having no answers, no foregone conclusions, no assurances, and no real sense of the outcome. I have stopped fighting it, and have instead decided to explore it, to feel its textures, and see what it has to offer. And I find that I’m enjoying the drift, the sense that all possibilities are open and that I don’t yet know what is unfolding for me creatively, only that something is.
Swimming and sleeping
To slip
under you need courage, or
great fatigue. To float
requires a skeptic’s mind.
To breach into light, first the
surface must be expecting you.
Memo on roleplaying games
Note: When you write your article about online roleplaying games, do not say: We are not possessed by demons, we are possessed by our own life force, our incredible power is bent back on us in a world unequipped to accept the magnificence of our offerings. Poetry no longer decodes our desires and if any does, we don’t know where to find it, so we pour all of our nobility and our repressed physical courage and our keen intelligence and our telepathic connection to nature into little pixelated beings that resemble us, that remind us of why we once came to this planet to be alive. Because you’re pretty sure someone probably already said that.
Woodrat Podcast 44: Reversible books
watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo
The Woodrat Podcast returns from summer vacation with its first ever video episode (but don’t worry, this will remain mostly an audio show). I wanted to do a bit of a show-and-tell with some poetry books published as reversible, upside-down or tête-bêche books, including, most recently, Triplicity by Kristen McHenry and Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington, forthcoming from Indigo Ink Press.
Additional links:
- Dos-à-dos & Tête-bêche Bindings (AbeBooks — includes selection of books and a video)
- The Good Typist (Kristen McHenry’s blog)
- Chella Courington’s page at Red Room
- Bridget Meeds: Wilson Laboratory’s Poet in Residence
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).