Lost

..."I'm so lost", yes, "I am lost in the desert of your mind" and "I am full of doubts." From explodingdog, a site I found on The Daily Pick.

Here's one to go with the Paz poem.

For my motionless friends

..."There is a motionless tree" by Octavio Paz. Near the end of his biography at Nobelprize.org it says this: "Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense."

Self-portraits are the focus

...of this article by Matthew Collings. His tv series on self-portraiture will air in September. I wish I could see it. I have self-portraits going back to when I was a teen. I did the first one after reading a book about Van Gogh. I never look at my self-portraits, at least not intentionally, but occasionally I'll come across one when I'm looking through the flatfiles for something else and every time the mere sight of my watercolor face leaves me motionless. Not that they are good or anything like that. I don't know what it is. Anyhow, getting back to the Collings article, the last three paragraphs touch on the final episode, which looks at women artists. The final sentence struck me: "In their different ways, they all come up with the kind of self that present-day art is most willing to tolerate: a collage of fragments with unexpected sincerities and insincerities - being false seems true, while being exaggeratedly authentic might seem a bit false."

In my gut I foresee not only ulcers

...but "ulcers the size of kumquats" as Tim Clare puts it in his article "Everyone does not have a novel inside them." He's right. I only have about 87% of a novel inside me. The rest, be it good, bad or otherwise, is already written.

Here's where the ulcers come in. Today I embarked on another poetry project. I hadn't planned on it. In fact, I'm still working on Bone Conduction. I suppose it's a natural leap and I am excited, but at the same time I wish I'd finish one thing before starting another.

I've been paying a lot of attention to sonnets

...lately, so naturally these two posts on Lime Tree caught my attention. (from Ahadada)

Utility

...and "the malady of literature non-reading" are discussed in this article by historian John V. Lombardi. It's a familiar topic, yes, but the article has a slightly different slant.

This blog is a participatory democracy

...or so this article by Steven Winn suggests. I read the last two paragraphs a couple times. Winn captured me with these sentences: "We've also absorbed a full-measure of post-modern awareness. Authority - in government, the media, the arts - is provisional. Reality is subjective, transparent. We are all authors of our own fictions, a construct of authentic and mediated experience."

For some reason the Doozer constructions on Fraggle Rock come to mind.

Greatness

...is discussed in this article by Jonathan Jones on Rembrandt's newly restored Girl at a Window.

The timeline

...for Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s to 1970s is nicely done. According to the timeline, I was born sometime during the kinetic art movement. I didn't know that. Earlier this year I watched my own kinetic assemblage come to life and move. Now I'm stretching timelines.

There's more

...Emily Dickinson on Salt and Ice. The post includes a link to the 2003 Reith lectures on The Emerging Mind. This, too, I will park here as I wait and wait for my mind to emerge.

I'm going to park

...The Sibylline Oracles here for now.

A Creative Writing MFA blog

...started up yesterday.

The eruption

...updates continue to draw my attention. I checked on Kilauea again before we headed out this morning and wondered what it is about the reports that keeps me coming back. Of course I didn't think about it at all as we drove from one lake to another, one river to the next and creek to creek, the August smells pulling us along. Each place has its own distinct, heady scent. I'm sure I could recognize some by smell alone. Limestone Lake would be one. The Wildnest River might soon be another. Today as I watched it flow, I tried to learn the lap and line of its ripples, the weight of its smells. Then I thought about what it means to come back.

A list of body poems

...and links to even more can be found in "Poems about the Body" at Poets.org.

A series of paintings

...from Eastern Tibet has occupied my attention this morning. The zoom feature works quite nicely to allow reasonable looks at details.

Details. Lately I've been painting daily and each day I sit back and wonder what I'm doing in the work. What is it saying?

Here's a lengthy exchange

...between Robert Birnbaum and Camille Paglia. In it Paglia says "But there is something—a craving for something. A reorientation. So I am saying, “Back to basics. Let’s begin again, get the big broom.” She goes on: "Sweep out all this stuff, this post-modernist, structuralism stuff which hasn’t led to anything but a lot of very successful, tenure and promotion and salaries." And she goes on.

The 0545 August 17 eruption update

...concerning Kilauea, a Hawaiian volcano, is almost a poem in itself. I like this: "Fume hangs in the crater, but glimpses of all vents come and go."

It's fuming here, too. I'd love to be in Regina tonight. Some writers I like are reading and at least one of those fine writers made sushi for the event. Sushi. How good was the sushi?

After a long day of painting

...I crawled on the bike and read a few pages of Charles Simic's Selected Poems. The book arrived in the mail today. As I pedalled away, going nowhere, I read the opening poem "Butcher Shop" over and over.

Tonight I'll continue reading The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby. I'd put the book down for a while.

Fairy tale

...links galore! The one that left the greatest mark on me was Rumpelstiltskin.

To entertain myself this evening

...I've been visiting links on Languagehat.

More on the letters of poets

...appears in The Guardian in Andrew Motion's review of The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Two sentences regarding Lowell's letters "to and about other poets" struck me. Motion says that "once his career is launched, this zeal deepens as he draws round him (or at least develops contact with) the strong poets of his own age." And this: "but where a smaller heart might have allowed the whole business to slide into mere neurosis about the pecking order, Lowell embraces the richness of his surrounding talents as a spur."

I wonder if T.S. Eliot had any inkling

...that his letters would eventually be put up for auction? I wonder if he wrote them with that in the back of his mind, functioning as editor?

I remember breaking into giggles when I was reading Madame de Sevigne: Selected Letters, thinking I'd better smarten up with my letter writing so I might one day bequeath "an extraordinarily vivid picture of life" in Canada as the book jacket says she had of the France of Louis XIV. It's been at least 10 years since I read that book. These days my letter writing is e-regular, e for email of course, and my internal editor sits feet up and snoozing, not a worry in the world, letting all the wayward marshmallows and puffed wheat through. Yes, marshmallows and puffed wheat made it into recent letters. Clearly my internal editor has a sweet tooth and a vision of a future that does not include an auction block.

Delightful

...is not a word I normally use, but it and other sugary adjectives found their way into my latest birding column. I did enjoy our trip to Churchill.

I painted again today. Actually, I lifted some color off both paintings. I think I'm finished with them now.

A lively discussion

...about literary magazines over at Bookninja and another great discussion on Mark Truscott's blog set the stage for my day in the studio. Nothing seemed impossible.

As I was painting, I tried to settle into a meaning of entertainment so I could better consider Mark's question, but my thinking proved to be as puddled and muddled as the colors.

Tonight two paintings - the one from yesterday and the one from a few days before - are hanging to dry. Both have some issues that need to be resolved, but, all in all and surprisingly enough, they seem to work.

Nothing has been on my mind

...the past couple days, so I spent part of the morning searching for nothingness. One topic in this bit about nothing held my attention for quite some time: "The problem of multiple nothings."

Perhaps nothing held my attention too tightly. Indeed, I blame the problem of multiple nothings on the problems I had with my painting today. The biggest issue I had was with the process itself. It felt so unfamiliar. My approach to watercolor seems to have changed against my will and so has my approach to color. Nothing went right at all.

Here are some comments on "Nothing Gold Can Stay", a poem by Robert Frost that fits well the day.

Here's the view

...from my office window, which faces east. The photos were taken just across the street and a wee bit north. I don't know who took the photos, but I imagine it was someone involved with The Green Project. There are other before and after pictures as well, including ones from locations just a stone throw from here, that show the success of the project. Things are looking especially green this year.

Subway Life

...is a must-see flash of drawings by Antonio Jorge Goncalves of people sitting in subway trains in cities around the world. (Thanks, Ariel)

Naturally, a trench

...would be dug. I should've seen that coming. It was a very long trench. However, by the time we returned from a photo shoot late this afternoon, the earth was back in place, the surface smooth. This morning, as I searched for particular passages in David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous and Mircea Eliade's The Sacred & The Profane, I learned that the sound of digging is a sound I can work with. If I could listen closely enough, I bet I'd hear the same sound coming from my mind.

Tonight I started reading The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.

Of course, today a jackhammer

...is beating on the foundation. It started at 7 a.m. Needless to say, my cat is all ajog, my mind ajar. A jittering empty jar. I can't think.

This afternoon I will assist with a photo shoot in the forest nearby. It's an ongoing macro project. My job is to block the wind. I'll be watching for bears as well.

The poetics of sincerity

...is front and centre in this piece on Roethke and James Wright. (From Maud Newton)

I've stuck to easy reading today, skimming over blogs and through short articles that require little concentration. Yes, yesterday's drill and hammer deconstruction across the street turned into a full blown demolition. By nightfall the building should be gone. That's a good thing. The noise is cutting into my ability to think and it's freaking out my cat.

A dry tube

...of paint. A missing brush. That set the mood for painting yesterday. Thankfully the sound of drills and hammers from the deconstruction across the street didn't find its way into the studio like it had my office. In the morning I'd been trying to read John Ashbery's Where Shall I Wander, but the hammers kept banging the words back out of my head. Anyhow, the day whipped by in the studio. I produced a large watercolor, the first in a very long time.

To celebrate, I ordered three books. A memoir, a novel and a collection of poems.

Symbol-minded

...is a term I found in "Mindful of Symbols" by Judy S. DeLoache in the latest Scientific American. "Because of the fundamental role of symbolization in almost everything we do, perhaps no aspect of human development is more important than becoming symbol-minded," says DeLoache.

A-Z is covered

...in "Between Rock and Stone: a geopoetic alphabet" by Don McKay in The Antigonish Review.

The Northern Research Portal

...is a recent project launched by the National Library and Archives Canada. (Thanks, Kevin)

Truth

...has been a topic of conversation lately, not only on Mark Truscott's blog, but in other less public arenas where writers gather and chat. It's not a new topic, yet there is a fresh tone.

Pressure

...and the development of poetic style is discussed in "The Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts" by Dana Levin in the latest issue of The American Poetry Review.