We spoke French in the cab
I do not know why
We were very drunk
The driver was excited
With the foreigners —
These strange unknown
fools and their compassion. Continue reading
I have received some positive feedback from my “Bog and Tower” paper so I wanted to provide a little more background on how and why I went to Ireland. Here is my James W. Meyer Grant Application. I have achieved some of these goals, many are still unfinished, ground left unearthed:
In 2005, I walked into a bookstore and selected a book of poems… Continue reading
I wrote the following essay during a month in Ireland with support from a James W. Meyer Grant and under the supervision of Professor Jay Parini. Thank you to everyone who made this project possible.
Yeats has his Tower; Heaney his bog and birthplace: Mossbawn. The places have expanded with their writing beyond the boundaries of a physical site. The spaces are now multitudinous, functioning simultaneously, uneasily, almost combustibly as literary symbol and real-world place. Yeats and Heaney also define these places to define themselves and it is thus useful to view and examine them in order to understand the poets themselves, their similarities and their differences. Continue reading
Thoor Ballylee
Yeats, The Tower, first edition
Written in the National Gallery of Ireland, January 2009
“The Cavalier’s Farewell to his Steed” (1949)
His face a storm of light, a lightning-crackle
Of brain-movement, forward facing, directional brilliance,
While his legs full of midnight gore, gloop and buckle—
But, hold now a second, look deeper:
Is that blue murk and dabble his face?
The blue shadow, an eyeless gaze,
Cast at the steed, nostalgia stumped—
The lollipop-movement of a two-faced man Continue reading
Dugout, pithouse, cavehouse, burdei, yaodong –
each a calling back to the world
of whirled earth, of square and honest plantings,
each born of dirtscrape, turfscrap, cow dung.
Whole towns dig down to the roots of things:
Mangup-Kale, the Goth’s submerged city;
The Barrio of Guadix: where old maestros
di pico still tunnel today, lost in their earthing; Continue reading
Hello and welcome to my workshop, my place to test the weight and heft of ideas, poems, photos, and whatever else compels me. I invite you to read my work and share your thoughts. If the content here appears disparate — works of poetry next to marketing advice, meditations on memetics next to thoughts on gene therapy next to thoughts about urban life next to a youtube video of lolcatz… Continue reading
