This Commentary suggests that it is possible, from an economic perspective, that any individual artist/celebrity suicide may be of net benefit to society. Sales of the artist’s products and associated merchandise may increase after the suicide, and people, including those who were not even born at the time of the suicide, may derive value from [...]

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When she was born everything was realigned. The old books rewritten around this new discovery: a new formulation of how things come to be, a revised history of chance and change, this bold newcomer with her own specific gravity.
And now the redefining. We are of the same starstuff, but she’s just a visitor. The [...]

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It sounds better to title this post positively than to say what it’s really about: my intolerance. The common adage is that as one grows older one grows more intolerant. But when I was younger I was already extremely intolerant. Not in the grand and notable ways– I quickly outgrew my childhood racism and homophobia, [...]

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Scott Rosenberg draws a connection between a Breughel and a photo taken on 9/11. He also points to one of my favorite Auden poems about the painting: Musee des Beaux Arts. The parallel between my feelings about 9/11 and the poem/painting are clear and raw. 9/11 was a horrific, tragic event. But it, like any [...]

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I came across this phrase today– living intentionally– that had never really registered with me in the past (perhaps because I am allergic to self-help books) but is a perfect summation of what all my recent lifestyle changes are about. Talking too much about such changes invokes a kind of superstition… too often the choice [...]

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Sometimes there is no direct comfort. The coffee is black sand in my mouth. My blankets are sandpaper. I can’t curl far enough to disappear. I sit and wait but it refuses to rain. These times it’s better to give the words away. I imagine her at the counter with flour on her hands, kneading. [...]

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For a friend who insists on telling me it’s not that bad because it’s all in my head. Imagine (or recall):

The feeling of sinking into the depths upon waking up in the middle of a dream where you were reliving the single best event in your entire life in full technicolor…

The deadly disappointment of the [...]

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I’ve often pondered why new media–particularly blogs, but also podcasting and audio-blogging–has really taken off within only a relatively narrow group of practicing poets. In the “post-avant” school, people blog like crazy and in all kinds of ways. More traditional and the “quiet” poets blog very little.
Does the kind of poetic practice each engages in [...]

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More research into a possible genetic basis for homosexuality. The idea that sexual orientation is essentially completely genetic feels so intuitively and obviously right to me that I have a hard time crediting other ideas as being anything other than ludicrous. But my intuition’s track record is so-so.
[cosmopoetica, news]

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I’ve been away from poetry blogland for quite some time: partly due to a really heavy travel schedule but also because I had grown weary of the whole scene.
If I read, I write. It’s not in my nature– nor is it very fulfilling– to lurk. But I have to ask myself what I am [...]

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A lethal combination for nostalgia: in a few hours my daughter starts her freshman year of high school at my old high school. At this moment, still unable to sleep, I’m listening to the Say Anything soundtrack circa 1989. I was Lloyd Dobler, and how well I remember my Diane Cort. This after a dose [...]

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The question at hand is how to create some semblance of a real person out of the increasingly divided parts of myself. That there is more than one me, and that some parts can operate independently and seemingly without difficulty has been the ruin of many friendships and more than one more intense relationship.
My workaday [...]

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Over at the Commonplace Book, I posted what is probably the most accurate theme poem for my life right now…

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Tonight was the reward for enduring a relatively rotten week in real life: an evening watching the Mingus Big Band (a great show… more later), then midnight coffee and working on some new poems. I will finally get to sleep guilt-free.
I realized tonight that my work is often– maybe always– about impossibility. The impossibility of [...]

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I don’t know how to “problematize my reception” or “foreground the struggle of artistic creation.” I’m not sure I want to. I value clarity. I value having something to say and saying it. I can’t bring myself to invoke– or invest in creating– a process filtering what I have to say in order to make [...]

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I’m unabashedly geeking out at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference. As much fun as it is, it leads to questions and more questions that keep me up at night, like: Is this really the community to which I belong? Is it possible to serve two masters– art and tech– without finally being mediocre at both? [...]

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We hate the thing we fear, the thing we know may be true and may have a certain affinity with ourselves…
There’s more to this quote posted by Nick Piombino that pretty well sums up my feelings late this Christmas eve.

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In some way I am still trying to come to terms with the mental image of Josh Corey playing Dungeons & Dragons when he was younger. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to internalize that he still plays. And he’s very eloquent about it. But I shouldn’t be surprised– some of the most [...]

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I spent most of the flight home from Ketchikan fuming about poetry blogland and scribbling in my little notebook all the things I was going to say. I pictured each statement in my mind with a soft thwacking sound of my mental dueling gloves across the cheek of my poetic antagonists.
“Yo, Mayhew!” I planned [...]

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I received an unexpected gift today– a copy of the Paris Review 25th Anniversary Issue. The person who gave it to me had no idea what they were giving me. To her it was an outstanding copy of a magazine she knows I like to read. And it is. But it is also a small [...]

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