For the past few weeks, I've seriously curtailed my creative activity. Two of my last poems, Red Sailboat and Slo Shook, for me, represented a struggle. In my eyes, they lacked magic, passion, excitement. All the little ecstasies of spontaneous creation. Which I thought I might find again by doing something new and experimental with [...]
Tag: art
Supernova
This post is formatted to reflect an original journal entry. 1/9/19 Spent most of the day working on a poem that hasn’t fully formed yet. Best thing that happened today: I acquired The Legendary Christine Perfect Album (1970) for my vinyl collection. Post-Chicken Shack, pre-Fleetwood Mac Christine McVie. Gritty, bluesy, fun listening. Finished Huxley’s The [...]
Free Form
This post is formatted to reflect an original journal entry. 12/23/18 Spent most of the day reading. And writing in between spurts of cookie-making. Ricotta cookies. Nothing tastes more like Christmas. Except maybe my aunt’s lasagna, a big slice of ham, and a glass of the Dago Red that was bottled in the neighbor’s basement. [...]
Lo Buzz
This post is formatted to reflect an original journal entry. 11/1/18 I am convinced I do most of my best thinking in my sleep. Is this a terribly peculiar thing to say? I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping my notebook and pencil on the nightstand, within grabbing distance for bouts of 3 a.m. inspiration. [...]
Rain Buzz
Originally published on Morality Park There will have been a night that sat on a house with no fence where the stars came in A night made of lightning, like a flash that tore from between two legs, switched off the lights, and crowded the walls with neighbors like a speakeasy, a room with a [...]
Patchwork
I don’t contemplate trees or the latticework of a banana peel like a tulip lined fence under the bark of a dogwood preparing to burst its flowering buds in the wake of a blue bird’s wing I don’t like structure or formalism or heavy expostulations or connect-the-dots 1-2-3 like academics and paper hangers do abab [...]
The One-Two
It never occurred to me that the personal-growth-related phenomena I have spent so much time learning and writing about here on The Used Life may, in fact, have part of their origins in perception (of all things). Indeed, it wasn’t until I began reading Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being, only late last week, [...]
