langwage binds us 2gethr separatelee n parts n sharing almost replikating nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest communal spells we ar all bound n unbound in
A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.”
Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there was a constant buzz of fluorescence. He lost a decision to a good-looking guy his own age from the ymha, and punch by punch it was his most painful fight.
You are clearly preoccupied with love. See the way you sift through the lint from your purse, searching for the backing of an earring. See the runway of broken leaves and bread crumbs collecting under the emergency brake in your car. Messy, messy.
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
I was looking for people with something to say. Something to say about what mattered to them, a kind of pulse. Most of the people in my life have a pulse, sure. But is that it, I wondered.
Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.
Sheila was reading Knit Lit, an anthology of stories about knitting edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf (Three Rivers Press) and some of them were making her laugh out loud, especially the one about an oversized synthetic orange sweater that acquired the nickname “Big Ugly” and became the mascot of its creator’s office mates.
When I was an undergrad, I took a psychology class in which the professor described various types of creativity. One of them was the creative act of taking things already in existence and reorganizing, reordering, recreating them to make something new. By extension, Alan Moore is a creative genius. Moore, a writer who specializes in comics, is responsible for Watchmen (DC Comics), the superhero comic that reinvented the genre; From Hell (Eddie Campbell Comics), a graphic-novel investigation into the mystery of the identity of Jack the Ripper; Promethea (America’s Best Comics), a comic series imagining of why a particular iconic character has appeared in various pop and high culture forms over the ages; and the comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (ABC).
When Rob and Sheila went away for the weekend, Rob was reading, but not enjoying, Spadework by Timothy Findley (HarperFlamingo). This was Rob’s first foray into Findley and he moaned and groaned about the silly plot filled with actor-worship, and the pretentious writing, characterized by the regular appearance of the phrase “he lighted his cigarette”—in Rob’s opinion, everyone else in the world would have just said “he lit his cigarette.” Sheila tried to get Rob to give up on Spadework and read something he liked but he wanted to stick with it so that when someone asked him if he had read any Findley, he’d have an answer.
