All posts in prose

In his essay The Poet and These Times, Hugo von Hofmannsthal said about the poet: “It is as if his eyes had no lids.”

This is the only means by which I judge the quality of a poem, the only constant—if I am made to feel that way about the poet (all other qualifiers seem to be fickle and superfluous). However numerous and creative the patterns, the qualities of the materials, or the opinions of the times, Art will forever be a see-through dress.

Alice in Wonderland being about math (algebra, Euclidean geometry, projective geometry, internal logic, &c.) and not at all about drugs in a lot of ways makes sense socially as well. Who but the high enjoy the slow and subtle and maddeningly boring? The answer’s right there- those who decide to think and think and think. But… We are a drug laden land, not (no longer?) of Wonder. We take pride in our lack of queer rabbit-holes. Look how straight our lawns are. Look.

What’s the benefit of an all-powerful immortal genius? The benefits are all-around infinite. But it depends, from its point-of-view are we more trouble than we’re worth?

I personally welcome the singularity with open arms because I equate greater-than-human-intelligence with wisdom and compassion.

The whole The Matrix scenario is based on the false premise that technology would be as cruel/ stupid/ thoughtless/ self-centered/ dopamine seeking as homo sapiens. Doesn’t greater than human intelligence equate with wisdom and doesn’t that equate with active preservation of those less capable and good? Isn’t The Matrix really just an overdressed simple-minded distrust of other homo sapiens with power? It presumes that anything else that’s intelligent and in a position of power will, as most humans have done, turn to enslavement and cruelty. I doubt the singularity would fashion itself in the likeness of Man, I don’t see how that would in any way be intelligent/wise.

If the singularity ever arrives the biggest Continue Reading →

There’s something repulsively simple about a world that’ll only be impressed by power (be it of body, soul, or mind) and order, or the lack of them.

I find it weird that when people meet me they see I look and act like a kid, and that I know nothing of the world. That’s all I am. Yes, these infinite infinitesimals have me completely and romantically but I don’t like talking about them. I mean, you don’t either. I mean, your habits betray you right? …I laugh a lot I guess. It’s not “manly,” but oh well. (This should probably be funnier blah blah blah.) I mean, who actually wants to talk about Simone Weil and John Brunner? About how they were right about The Horror in the Lord’s Love Poem? When we could be making money instead, for ourselves and our future’s children (I mean, how much do you make an hour? A year?). (In the midst of life, we are in employment: seek, travel and print, seek-left-right-travel-and-bang as the Chinese typewriter went which I saw working when I was a translator in the Institute. // Les Murray, Employment for the Castes in Abeyance)

It’s all ironic in the sour run I guess. We’re all kids, dancing around the in-solution with that quiet old, fearsomely-boring, gaze of its.

Love, kindness, austerity, and the elimination of the ego are the only actionable weapons a truly hateful person has; not as means to ends, but as gradual realizations that they are the only miracles (all else is surrender).

I see this as you stating the same thing many great poets eventually do with a sigh when all they see around them are people in love with how well they can masturbate through words (“Look at how nude they are, how sexy, how shocking, how they allude to nature, to the heart, the good, the dark, the esoteric. Look! Look!! Look how I cry!!!”).

Why do people enjoy this? I want to read poems that move like wrecking balls. And that transform me into the building they long to touch. // Tomás Q. Morín

Good poetry is the difference between just having sex and making love. It is making love; it’s old news and the odds are against you before the very act and yet you participate. And you participate with an open-heart because you know that you’ll never reach that sweet release all emotionally closed up like that (this is old news). It holds yet destroys you completely, and it’s drawn-out yet over too quickly. It’s Continue Reading →

Things you will find all over the world: McDonald’s, Starbucks, Torontonians, Melbourners, Londoners, and Edokko. Rewording P. Lockwood, “A city cannot visit any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives away its people. Well, except for the US.” The US is a haphazard collection of psychic cities, all screaming, “Fuck you, hold my beer, my dreams will come true.” They walk through the streets and will not even see the sights, too full they are of the sights.

Make time for it, and only it. And above all else, don’t trust yourself.

A writer should always be the first person to wake up and work, that’s the only way anyone will take you seriously. That’s the only way you’ll take yourself, seriously. Remind yourself that you want to be— no, are a writer, a person who writes words; but don’t trust your moods or your loves of them. They, moods and loves, though wonderful, wax and wane to and fro, and those grounds aren’t stable enough to build anything on. Keep a strict schedule of an austere mindset that’s, at minimum; three parts self-chastisement, four parts unavoidable, and five parts very very simple. Ridicule yourself for not putting pen to papers or fingers to board. To paraphrase poet Ilya Kaminsky, “A blank page is the white flag of your surrender.” Only cowards surrender, and the last thing you want to be is a coward.

I’ve set things up so that the first things that open up as I login around 5AM are a blank page and the day’s schedule, and after that I remind myself of what I want and don’t want to be.

To paraphrase Theodore Roethke, one of the greatest poets to ever bleed on page, “Poetry is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” And to expand on my first pseudo-mentor Charles Bukowski, “When you’re a cup of coffee away from brimming with total mad darkness but are still imbued with that love of life, you’ve got to repeatedly empty yourself. Again and again.” But that (my) love of life is very uncompromising, especially when my very being is on the line. My love demands that I not use this means of calculated spilling as a substitute for sobbing or acrobatics; that I not waste its time by masturbating in public like that. It demands that I be whole, and nothing less, if only for a while.

What I’m trying to say is that Continue Reading →