Tom Thompson @tomthompson - Tumblr Blog

This is a link to today's poem-a-day inspired by the Saroyan (with an assist from the Berkshires)

Portland + Los Angeles

The American poet Norman Dubie says that what gives poetry so much freedom is that no one gets rich off writing it. Passion, and expressive language, drive poems into the world.

Poetry is unique among artforms because it uses as its medium the building blocks of all communication, and, more or less, the building blocks of thought: language. Poetry uses language to communicate something that is beyond language, which is weird and causes things to be at once both what they are and so very much more than they are.

At its most minimal, language speaks to us on two levels: it communicates raw info and it communicates contextual feelings and directions about that info. In the 1960s and ’70s, Aram Saroyan was mining this linguistic landscape to much notoriety — and infamy. His poem, “lighght,” exploded the idea of what a poem even is.

And as the tattoo here illuminates, it’s still exploding ideas right down to the skin. This left hand belongs to another poet, Zachary Schomburg, who writes notes on his hands when he’s not collaborating and touring with musicians and filmmakers and making the sincerest surrealist books since sliced pages.

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Ace Hotel is alrighght with me.

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I love that I saw this on Tumblr the same day as my poem "After Lighght" came out on poem-a-day!

How I spent my President's Day

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These are the days that must happen to you.

—Walt Whitman

I wish I could subscribe me to Marianne Moore's scrapbooks Tumblr. Sign me up! (loving the new bio Holding on Upside Down).

amiwithani

"Like many poems, it’s an exercise in conjuring up a spirit." — Seamus Heaney on writing poetry

RIP, Seamus Heaney.

I worked with him when I was at FSG, in one of those young-to-working experiences that I still sort of can’t believe I got away with. The company wanted to launch at poetry blog, which I somehow got to name, launch, and record all of our poets reading their favorite FSG poems for.

I emailed Seamus Heaney, not expecting him to ever get back to me. One day the phone rang, and a strange man said, “hello. This is Seamus. Seamus Heaney. I’d like to read some Ted Hughes, that old magician, if you’d allow it.”

It is a testament to how close I was to still being a teenager that I was able to pretend I was totally cool and not at all surprised to be talking to one of my favorite poets.

We recorded Heaney introducing and reading Hughes’ “The Thought Fox,” which is where the quote above comes from, and his own poem “Postscript.” You can still find them here.

(via amiwithani)

Cathy Park Hong on the 1 train.

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Thelonious Monk’s Advice

via Openculture

#Monk #Lifeadvice

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Anything Remembered / Alfred Starr Hamilton

One cloud, one day Came as a shadow in my life And then left, and came back again; and stayed

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An erasure I made from page 67 of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

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They called it a “coding error”. This made it sound like they were sequestered in a bunker surrounded by black screens on which a continuous parade of figures flickered past. Instead it was just someone using Excel on a laptop who was highlighting cells for a formula and released his index finger from the left-clicky button of his mouse too soon. The debate has raged - well raged is a strong word, perhaps sulked? - since Monday about the significance of the calculation mistake made by Reinhart and Rogoff in their 2010 paper for the American Economic Review, Growth in a Time of Debt. Did the conclusions about debt, growth and need for painful correction send the politicians of the world to the special cabinet to dust off the scourges? That debate is meaningless because the last five years of economic prediction have told us one thing: No one knows anything any more and the people who say they know something know even less. The main point to take from this debacle is the truly awesome power of Excel. Not its processing ability, just its ubiquity. As much as oil and water, our lives are governed by Excel.

BBC News - The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel (via new-aesthetic)

"Potentiality is slaughtered on the altar of probability."

--Viktor Meyer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier in BIG DATA

We're looking to rent our beloved upstate place (Hudson view, 2 hrs from NYC) for the summer or longer term. Let me know if you're interested. Follow the link for some photos.

Today's pairing: "Hallucinogenesis" by D.C. Gonzalez-Prieto with "Write like a motherfucker" by The Rumpus

Problems & Solutions

"Insanity and poetry are old kin" writes Daniel Pritchard in his piece on Everyone Has a Mouth in Critical Flame. Coincidentally I just finished Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay. In the book's introduction, Storr writes

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent.

It's not clear to me if Ernst Herbeck's condition extended from his verbal flights to an encompassing system. But even if the artful verbal patterning associated with schizonphrenia is simply the verbal "scratching" of a mental "itch", it remains a way to handle and temper what Storr calls "the chaos within."

To be of use

From this morning's Twitter feed in the order in which they appeared: RT @siobhanphillips Capitalism wants constant produce/consume. Excessive signification is complicit rather than oppositional, therefore . . . RT @paulbogaards Sharon Olds: 'I want a poem to be useful' http://gu.com/p/3ckzd/tw via @guardian RT @siobhanphillips . . . Conceptual poetry=another way. Asks us to reimagine poetry when its job no longer to provide or frustrate meaning. Nealon in #mla13 #s683

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