I’m reading an article on former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, from a newspaper in Norman OK:

“One of the reasons people don’t read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets,” he said. “It’s not the public’s fault. There’s an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I’d say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn’t worth reading.”

It’s the other 13 percent, Collins said, that he lives for. “Poetry should be transparent. Transparent poems tend to teach themselves.”

“Or those poems should say something about the state of the poet and his environment.”

[Link]

Mr. Collins is probably right, but just a little off the point. The problem is that poetry is being written at all, not just that it’s bad. The problem is that our society is superficial, shallow, impatient, and selfish. Before one can write a poem, it’s necessary to have the artistic impulse that can be expressed in no other way. Is anyone capable of thinking that deeply in the days of Twitter? It’s not fun or easy, gentle reader. Writing is hard work, and poetry takes serious stillness.

Poetry is an art form, the function of which is to reach for the ineffable, that which can’t be reached in any other way. There’s so much bad poetry only because there’s too much poetry. People are try to use art to describe thought which is simply not worthy of art. Transparent or not, speaking to the poet’s state or not, it’s garbage in garbage out.

People want to write poetry because they think they ought to want to write poetry, but they haven’t had the collision with consciousness, or the long dark night of grief, which demands to become a poem. They’ve only had the thought that wants to be a journal entry or a letter to a friend, or a blog entry. That ain’t art.

A poet is first an explorer of his own pain and joy, and an artist with language second. And poetry should be the last resort of the writer. Then if the right words are in the right order, it might be worth reading.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
– Alexis de Tocqueville

We’re learning that he hard way, aren’t we? Along with the fact that no interminable war can help but to thwart the best intentions of democratic leaders.

Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.

-Shakti Gawain

This is the kind of thing beyond the comprehension of men like George Bush and Dick Cheney. Let’s hope and pray it’s not beyond that of Barak Obama and Joe Biden.

A very cool Calvin & Hobbes cartoon for you.

One of my favorites.

He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.

-Dante Alighieri, poet (1265-1321)

I am seriously concerned that our recent voter rebellion in California will make it impossible to help if asked, and to get help regardless of desperation.

People just voted No on everything as if doing so would make a point, a great gesture of voter defiance. I don’t think anybody read the ballots, let alone understood them. I’ve been to college and law school, and I found the texts obscure and badly written.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I think we the people of California have really peed in our chili this time.

baby jesusita
Originally uploaded by kylekimberlin

Early on Tuesday afternoon, I looked west from my precipice at the Fortress of Solitude and saw smoke. So here’s the Jesusita Fire, barely an hour old, May 5, 2009. It got bigger.

There are a lot of things I know nothing about, and one of the things I know the most nothing about is the NFL draft.

My cousin’s youngest son is a football player at Fresno State, about to graduate, having excelled at his sport. Which is great, and I often wish our Grandpa was still with us, because he would have gotten such a big kick out of Bear’s success.

So time has flown and I guess it’s time to go pro. (Was it Hunter S. Thompson who said When the going gets tough, the tough turn pro?) And I’ve got my mouse poised on the draft, about which I know nothing because I never had a reason to care before, and here’s hoping things go well for Bear.

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.

‘Who Is Mark Twain?’ — a collection of 24 previously uncollected stories and essays drawn mostly from the vast archive of the author’s papers and correspondence at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library — is an entertaining reminder of why that’s so.

[Los Angeles Times]

Unless you’ve read all of Twain and need something new, you’re probably like me, uninspired to run out and buy this. But it’s an interesting little article anyway.

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

-Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

Today’s Non Sequitur is pretty funny.

“E-mail, once the most effective way to communicate with your tech-savvy associates, has become useless for too many people. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? It’s essentially dead.”

John C. Dvorak, 9 Reasons E-Mail Is Dead – PC Magazine

Oh Baloney. I guess if he was honest, the title would have been 9 Reasons Why I Don’ Like E-mail As Much As I Use To Because It’s Not As Useful As It Should Be. Which wouldn’t have been nearly as catchy.

Sure it’s annoying when people don’t answer, or don’t bother to check their e-mail for a week. Spamming should be a felony, and spammers should be in prison. But saying e-mail is dead because of such annoyances is like saying telephones don’t work because people won’t return your calls. Or that snail mail doesn’t work because of the obsolete stamps.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the e-mail system; it’s the people who don’t use it right that make it a pain.

Come on, Dvorak, keep it real.

“Mark Twain fans will be interested to hear that a never-before-seen Twain story, “The Undertaker’s Tale,’ long buried within an enormous body of unpublished stories, letters, and essays, appeared this week in the pages of mystery magazine The Strand.” [Link]