Category: Craft (Page 1 of 19)

Another Good Poet But Not-My-Poet: C.D. Wright

May 4, 2026 / Big Bang Poetry

A few years ago I had this idea to try to find “my poet,” that poet who I could become a completist with, a poet I could become an expert in through intensive scholarship and fan obsession. I thought of it like who is my Cher poet, so to speak? Short of an actual fan shed, I could develop a fan shelf.

I read about other poets having their favorite writers “to scholar” about and I was feeling FOMO, like I should have one too. In a lot of ways seeing other poets have “their poet” can help you understand both poets better. Like Robert Duncan being a scholar of the poet H.D. It says something about what poets are attracted to other poets.

My first attempt at this was a deep dive into the poetry of Philip Levine a few years ago. Philip Levine was the first A-list, “famous” poet I ever saw in real life. He came to Sarah Lawrence one night in the mid-1990s to give a reading in the living room of Slonim House, a Tudor-style manor house on campus where all the graduate writing activities happened. I was standing in the entryway of the Slonim House and he came in with some of the other poets of Sarah Lawrence, probably Tom Lux and Marie Howe but I really can’t remember because Levine was like a superstar in this context. It was like the air was electric. He seemed a promising pick for my favorite poet. I even liked his greatest hits.

And so in the case of Philip Levine I spent months reading his poetry collections, interviews and essays. But I sadly came to the conclusion that he was not my poet. Although I loved his focus on labor subjects, it was all pretty humorless. And yeah politics can be humorless (especially now) but a poet should be allowed (or allow themselves) some breathing room in that area. Especially a poet as notoriously interpersonally funny as Philip Levine.

Last year I got the idea that my poet could be C.D. Wright. I came across an article on her by Stephen Burt from the L.A. Times. The article came from a huge stack of papers my friend Christopher who sent them to me almost a decade ago. (It’s taking me a minute to get through them.) The article is undated but it seems to have appeared after her sudden death in January of 2016.

This appealed to me particularly. Burt says,

“Wright’s artistic powers cannot be separated from her deep sense of democracy, her work against boundaries, rankings and exclusions, her insistence that poetry, and society, should become not a hierarchy or a star system or a way to exalt a singular self but a way to be generous, to share the powers we get, to give of oneself, to let everybody come in.”

I loved this. I feel this way all the time. Why is everything a f**king competition?

Burt goes on to explain how Wright came from the Arkansas Ozarks area. (And I grew up not far from the Missouri Ozarks area so I felt I might have some fly-over sympathy with her there too). Wright was incredibly worldly as well, having lived in San Francisco, Rhode Island and Mexico. (She died from a blood clot that resulted from an overly-long flight coming home from Chile.)

She seemed a good balance of worldly and local.

Burt calls her a “trustworthy” poet and he spent time with Wright and her husband, Forrest Gander. Burt wishes we all could have met her. And short of that he can be her critical champion: “What critics can do–maybe all a critic can do–is send you, with some encouragement or preparation, to the poems.”

So off I went. I realized pretty soon that I would love some of her long-form projects and not like the LANGUAGE or sentence-collage poems. In my favorite poems she had a beautifully meandering quality like what I love about reading Anne Carson. I felt a very similar pleasure reading these kinds of Wright poems, and the nerdiest parts of minutia like you find in Moby Dick and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But the collage ones made me want to skim. And so that rules out C.D. Wright as “my poet” but there is so much to love here and I’ll review the books I read, ranking them in reverse order.

Rising, Falling, Hovering (2009)

I didn’t love this book. The jacket calls it “deeply personal and politically ferocious” but I was lost in there. Nothing came at anything straight on and there was no guiding theme to keep me tethered. The book won the Griffin Prize. I feel like maybe this was a failure on my part but it is what it is.

The only single page I dog-eared was a page with these words:

“His face unfurls furls
Poetry
Doesn’t
Protect
You
Anymore.”

This came at the end of a section of long lines and shows you what a master of alternating lines she was. Every later-day book does this, long lines interspersed with short ones, just as any good novelists can take you through long Proustian sentences and then punch you suddenly with a short one.

I did also like “End Thoughts” when I read it again in the book below.

The Essential C.D. Wright (posthumously edited by her widower Forrest Gander along with Michael Wiegers, 2025)

This is Wright’s Greatest Hits and includes a few poems or excerpts from all of her books along with personal photographs.

This was a frustrating book to purchase for me. I had to pre-order it from my local bookstore. And the customer service people who worked there kept grabbing it for themselves whenever the book came in . Weeks later I would call to inquire about it and be told it had been sold by mistake. The owner apologized about this and even gave me a deep discount on another book. But honestly, I’ve felt weird about going back there ever since. I’ve been ordering from Bookshop.org and just sending profits over to my local (which is a great thing about Bookstop.org) but I have not been visiting the store in person.

I’ll get over it.

Anyway, this book shows Wright’s evolution over the years, how skinny her poems were in the beginning and how it feels like a move of assertion when she let her lines go long.

There were some uncollected drafts I really liked like “Abandon Yourself in That Which Is Inevitable” with it’s last stanza:

“Just. Could
somebody
please
tell me.
What did it mean
that I was a girl.”

And poems like “Sculptor and Model” and “Margaret Kaelin Vittitow” (a mentor who appears later in One With Others known as V) and the poem “Alla Breve Loving” from Alla Breve Loving. And then from the book Terrorism the poems “Obedience of the Corpse” and the music poem “Tours.” There’s a good poem “Clockmaker with Bad Eyes” from Translations of the Gospel Back Into Tongues. The book Further Adventures with You had the lines starting to lengthen out in poems like “Wages of Love,” “Scratch Music” and “This Couple.” String Light had a numbered list poem called “Remarks on Color.” By One Big Self: An Investigation she is fully into paragraph poems and experiments with not only line length but line spacing. By Shall Cross she’s back to short lines and few-lines of poems, like “Light Bulb Poem.”

This book was an interesting overview of things but it didn’t feel quite essential to me and maybe the fates were telling me something when I kept getting my copies snatched out from under me at my local. But also I think the problem is that Wright really shines in the book-length poem and she is not really reducible to these excerpts taken out of context of her very formidable momentum.

It’s sweet that poet-husband Gander writes her introduction here. I can’t imagine Monsieur Big Bang doing that for me as he’s not very interested in poetry (aside from me being one). But in a lot of ways, this poet-couple of Wright and Gander seemed of-a-piece.

Casting Deep Shade (2019)

This was the book Wright was working on when she died. It’s Wright’s long, obsessive ode to the beech tree.

Although it wasn’t my very favorite of her books, this one “grew” on me, (Ha!) and is surely in my list of great book-length poems. I even talked it up on a walk last weekend with some of my friends who are tree peoples.

The book reminded me of the obsessive cataloging in Moby Dick; and I always have respect for any writer willing to go overboard (more puns) while researching a topic and then to expose some of that research in the final product. It reminds me of visiting a historic building and having some part of its structure exposed as an exhibit. The New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe does this with pieces of the old adobe building the museum is housed in, going back through time and renovations. It draws attention to the compiled and assembled nature of things.

As her last book, this one was given elaborate binding, maybe a bit excessive. But the poem is interspersed with beautiful distressed and abstract photographs of beech trees taken by Denny Moers. There are also illustrations throughout. One page I dogeared has a description of the scientific “Miura fold” for solar panels along with a diagram and how this relates back to beech tree leaves.

Clearly this was a labor of love and it feels good reading it.

In Essential I also dogeared “Why Leave You So Soon Gone” with lines like “Sharpen yourself on rock Say yes Don’t forget” and the poem reads like a self help guide for us and for the trees!

Here is a video of the publisher showing the book and her husband reading excerpts.

One With Others (2010)

The first book I read and definitely one of my top three favorites of hers. I immediately recommended it to my St. Louis book group, the one that focuses on American racial issues.

This long poem deals with the racial violence that happened in her hometown around the 1969 March Against Fear and the research she did to try to figure it out. The jacket calls it “a stunning work of investigative journalism and poetry” and it is quite an amazing collage of introspection, interviews, oral histories, photographs and newspaper research.

Wright interviews witnesses, activists, police, fugitives and follows the firing of a teacher in a black high school and the black students who protested it and their threatening detainment in an empty swimming pool. Most intimately, it follows the story of Wright’s mentor, another teacher who became involved which led to her being run out of the state of Arkansas (Margaret Kaelin).

It is one of the best books of poems I’ve read dealing with racism in America. Up there with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. My copy is dogeared and there are marginalia comments all over it. She deftly uses her page-layout experiments to evoke emotions and control the pacing and release of information.

Collage work at it’s very best. `

The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roach, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016)

This is Wright’s delightful ars poetica, her poems about the writing process and how one becomes inspired by other writers. It’s my favorite of all the books I read. So amazing, just poem after poem, even the off-the-rails title alluding to the messiness of the whole process.

Again, another book impossible to excerpt although this one is maybe easier than Casting Deep Shade or One With Others. She has multiple poems with the same titles where the same ideas keep getting reworked and mulled over and over again.

The “In a Word, a World” poems talk about word etymologies and connotations and parts of speech. Those are juicy things.

In most of the poems, she’s in conversation with her favorite poets and artists like Flannery O’Connor and Jean Valentine (all the “Jean Valentine, Abridged” poems, one example) and painter Agnes Martin and fiddler John Taggart, poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky and a list of others. Her poems titled “Hold Still, Lion” are all for poet Robert Creeley (one example). She has a series for William Carlos Williams all titled “Spring & All.” She talks back to them, agrees and disagrees, riffs on things they’ve said. She quotes her husband.

She attempts to define what poetry does. It’s so amazing.

“The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.”

She gets academic. She gets political. She talks about how poems are building projects. She defends poetry. The title of one great poem is “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Biggest Retailer” in which she says “Poets do not have the answer. They say what they see. They take their own pulse. They stay up thinking of lines of poetry that they might use.”

“Poetry abhors the lie” she says and the best of it “extends the line into perpetuity” and “enlarges the circle.” Poems awaken the dreamer and the schemer. “They draw not conclusions but further quantify the doubt.”

Yes, indeed.

She says, “Poetry is hard to abuse except by writing it poorly, and then the damage, let’s face it, is finite.”

She critiques her own project Rising, Falling, Hovering (how brilliant is that?) for four pages of dense paragraphs, like her own harsh review. She says, “Often lineation just does not bear up. Instead, she tried applying more pressure to passages that asserted themselves as prose.” The struggles of writing this book get continued in later sections and is all fascinating.

It’s fascinating how she holds herself accountable it all her messy, unsettled process. And accountable to the world. “Mostly, poets will fail. Words will tumble and fall. But in so failing and fumbling poets refuse to be accomplices.”

Like One with Others, my book is written all over and dogeared. This is a book every poet should read. And one of books I’ve read that makes me think, “I want to try that.” The whole book generally and “Questionnaire in January” specifically.

Of Robert Creeley she says what we would want anybody to say about us, “He was a man of his words. He was given to write poems.”

Of Jean Valentine she says, “She followed the string in the dark.”

Oh man. What a tangled and beautiful homage to the art of writing.

Cooling Time, An American Poetry Vigil (2005)

Separate from the poetry, Wright published a great books of essays, or a long meandering essay. I found this one pretty thick and impenetrable when I started it but then my brain broke through and I really loved it.

If the book above is an ars poetica, this one is a fluid kind of essay or group of essays. They’re very similar in some ways or both reaching toward the same thing from two separate ends. This feels more didactic or declarative than her normal verse.

From her “Op-Ed” intro:

“I believe the word uses wrongly distorts the world”

And then:

“Also I think that antithetical poetries can and should coexist without crippling one another. They not only serve to define their other to a much more exacting degree than would be possible in the absence of one or the other.”

[My point about autotune generally.]

On difficult poetry she says,

“It is not that complexity is overrated, but it is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it’s that the underside grows grungy if it isn’t exposed to a change of air.”

About trying new things, “it is about how differently things actually play out if you come and go by different portals, long live la difference; as for transcendence, well baby, that’s the sun’s job.”

And to those who work completely in experiment and beyond politics, she says:

“If you are so afraid of ending up with an opinion, afraid it will color your work, you might ask yourself how transparent is your refusal to make choices, how disinterested can any work be and still stand. How obvious is your withdrawal. What is the artistic advantage of neutrality, allowing such a condition never existed. How would it be distinguished from indifference or mere self-interest.”

That’s it exactly. You may have your motives but it all looks the same to the reader (because we’re not mind readers): neutrality and indifference.

And this:

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable alliances.

Narrative is. You have to know when to enter in, when to egress, when to provoke, when to let it be. However, narrative is overly identified with Southern poetry, whereas it is a life-long global condition not a literary convention. Poets should be willing to exploit the rind of narrativity, and be more than willing to be lost at the heart. Exceptional intellection is being exercised to decry narrative. I am not learning much from that line of refutation.

Never deprive the reader of opportunities for multiple egresses.”

A way with words, this one has. Later she says,

“If you do not use language you are used by it. If you do not recognize the terms peacekeeper missile and preemptive strike as oxymorons, your hole has already been dug.”

Page 92 goes into her theory of the line. She’s mostly suspicious of “line laws.” There’s a long statement about the survival prospects of poetry. She’s full of piss and vinegar in every direction:

“It is all to fair to assume most of us are poets or we wouldn’t be reading this, not when we could be watching the Redskins or be down in the den cleaning the guns or communicating something tangibly effective that we could either sell otherwise have the opportunity to make available to crowds such as porn stars and evangelists routinely reach.”

and

“I am among many of the hard-pressed to accept the fixed-foot-flat-earth-survivalist school of poetry calling itself ‘new formalist’ as being new much less formally interesting. By the same reading, only by lack of scrutiny and challenge could free-verse poets call verse free.”

She says, “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”

And this, this this:

“While some writers are choosing sides, others are building intricate arches over the gorge. Laying track. Crossing the borders by dark to take what they need from the novel here, history or astronomy there, and no more….

“The struggle for legitimacy is as unrelenting as the vigilance required to contain it…”

“We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going–often in different directions at once. And the behavior of language is such that parallel concerns and sympathies are available to serious practitioners on many levels, at any point in space and time–the formal, the inventive, the revelatory, the message plane itself…”

“Of the vanguard I can say, I admire their procedures, but I think their attitude stinks. Of the rear guard, I think their procedures and their attitudes stink. When this discord erupts into an all-or-none competition, the last reader can exit in a body bag…

“I submit you will have to strike down your own mythology about yourself, your loves, your ravishing and atavistic homeland. I am interested in the vision beyond this confrontational…I still want to keep pressing toward the outer edge of my own enterprise.”

Whew. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. So even if C.D. Wright is not “my poet” she is certainly a mentor and a kindred spirit at bare minimum. But just not someone I can obsess over.

Her website has many other poems to pursue.

While I was reading the long lines of C.D. Wright I got kind of tired, too. This happens also when I read Anne Carson and Albert Goldbarth. They are so intense and dense.

So while I was reading C.D. Wright I found a book on Charles Burkowski from my local library. Something about his thin, off-the-cuff lines on gritty topics worked like a refreshing sorbet while reading C.D. Wright. When I got tired of Wright’s sort of thick, dense tone, I could switch over to Burkowski’s irreverent one and then when I got sick of his somewhat spiritually-emaciated poetry I could go back to Wright for some meaty bones. But after I finished the library book, I ended up purchasing his Greatest Hits.

Essential Bukowski Edited by Abel Debritto 2016

Burkowski is a good poet of place, particularly Los Angeles. He is always refreshingly outside-of-the-academy system, although he works his own tramp schtick a bit cartoonishly.

Some of my favorite parts of the later book:

From “for Jane”

“what you were
will not happen again.

the tigers have found me
and I do not care.”

“the laughing heart” is perfect as a contrast in Burkowski’s cynical and optimistic gestures.

“You are marvelous
The gods wait to delight
In you.”

DIY vs. A.I.

February 11, 2026 / Big Bang Poetry

I’ve had many opportunities over the last few years to talk to other writers who are being required to use A.I. on the job or writers who are volunteering to A.I. as a pretty substantial writing shortcut, from that waiter at Dear Janes in Los Angeles using it to come up with teleplays to friends using it to start early screenplay drafts and editors and writers at consulting firms and magazines creating first drafts of think pieces.

I’ve noticed two things: people who love to write are annoyed and deeply discouraged by A.I. This feels like the end of the world for them.

But for the people who want to have written things but who don’t like the actual writing itself, they have found A.I. to be the solution to all their problems, especially the to become known as writers without actually writing anything. I know people like this, too. In many cases, they are a lazy and unimaginative group. And they now get to be writers because we will shortly cease to know the difference. We are already inundated by A.I. writing online. Right now, submitting to journals is based on an honor system (a check box where you declare you didn’t use A.I. to write your piece, Scouts honor.) What a mess. Not only do editors have to worry about lies in cover letters, but now lies about the whole enchilada. (Mmmmm…enchiladas!)

Sure, there are many programs out there working to help teachers and readers detect these A.I.-generated things by telltale signs, but there are also services online at this moment available to help those lazy students, writers and artists outsmart those existing A.I. detectors.

And so around it goes and here we are.

And don’t get me started on errors of A.I., those “hallucinations” and fake attributions. For well documented things, like medical information, there seems to be a higher rate of accuracy with A.I.. But for things society cares less about, like who wrote what poems, A.I. is full of cuckoo claims.

Someone recently wrote to me asking for the provenance of a poem about Georgia O’Keeffe. Every prior spin with A.I. had led to a different poet author, one allegedly me. So I tried it myself by running larger and larger word sets of the poem through A.I. and sure enough the poem was attributed to different poets each time (never again me) and the results came with elaborate explications about what those writers supposidly meant. Further searches in plain old Google revealed that these writers did not write the poem (Mary Oliver for one example) and that the poem did not in fact live online at all (to be evaluated by A.I.)

So A.I., it turns out, is a big blowhard, at least concerning poetry.

Who wrote what now is a big sad, mystery, the truth of it between you and your God.

So if we weed out The Lazy and Unimaginative set, we are left with those of us who really do enjoy the craft of writing, creating things “from scratch.” And DIY is a huge thing in many areas so there are plenty of us in this happy group. The big crowd at the yearly Albuquerque zine festival told me that.

These are people for whom automation robs them of all the fun. I would argue for myself that solving problems in writing is all the fun: shuffling, rejiggering the sentences and words, trying to locate the real message. There are endless experiments I would miss, personally.

So if you’re the kind of person who is disheartened by A.I. writings, you may also be the kind of person who likes writing exercises.

Here’s one you can try. Keep all your drafts intact.

Write a 25-line poem around one of these tangible things: shoes or cooking or trees.

Get a Thesaurus and change about 6-8 words, a few nouns and a few verbs. Don’t touch the adjectives yet.

Rewrite the poem making all short sentences long and all long sentences short.

Locate all your adjectives. Throw them all out and replace half of those with new ones.

Locate all your adverbs and replace them with inappropriate adverbs.

Swap your first and last sentences.

If you wrote about cooking, create a title that is about shoes or trees but still ties back somehow to cooking (even metaphorically). If you wrote about shoes, create a title that is about cooking or trees but still ties back somehow to shoes. If you wrote a poem about trees, create a title that is about shoes or cooking but still connects to trees.

Read all your 7 poems. Which one(s) do you like best and why. You may love your first draft best but you should know why and be able to articulate it.

I can’t say I never use A.I. to help me out of a search quandary. Google searches don’t always lead you to the right place. And we all have to pick and choose how to use A.I. or not use it. For someone for whom writing is a challenge, physically and mentally, I can see how A.I. could be a very helpful communication tool. But that’s understandably necessary communication work. I can also see how A.I. could save valuable time in science and technology: not having to “reinvent the wheel” every time. But I can’t see any benefits for art for which the struggle is a lot of the point.

There are a few things in this world that don’t need so much technological intervention, as poet Darby Hudson recently stated: “If the modern world makes you sick, remember–the heart is ancient and hasn’t had any updates.”

Short Story Challenge No.4

June 23, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Man. I was gonna do a short story every other month from January 2024. But I didn’t finish No.2 until last May. Here it is June 2025 and well, it’s been a couple of gnarly years to try and have things like plans and all.

So what happened to No.3?

I drew cards for No.3 in January but forgot to post about it. I was in a rush preparing to move my parents in Cleveland and intended to work on the story while I was there.

That was a terrible idea.

But anyway, let’s recap this project since it’s been over a year since we started.

I met a slew of writers at Sarah Lawrence College (located in Yonkers, New York) in the early 1990s. One day, long after I had lived there but when I was back visiting Los Angeles, the partner of one of those writers took me aside and asked me to motivate that writer to start writing again.

This was a tall order because I have always felt creativity projects, like anything else, should be self-motivated. If you’re meant to do something you will feel compelled to do it. If you are not compelled to do it, you maybe are not meant to do it (or do it anymore). In this case, this person hadn’t finished a writing project in about a decade. So I was pretty sure they weren’t interested….really.

But I kept thinking about the problem. It was a friend’s request so I had to try. When I discovered all the writing prompt cards I thought we could gamify the process together and I sent a set of cards to this writer. We made a plan to begin in January of 2024. Well, when that time came, the writer begged off very strenuously due to life dramas going on. Later, they admitted they didn’t think they wanted to write anymore after all.

This felt both sad and like a relief in a way. Comrade down but clarity and all.

But anyway, I found the card process of random story points to be exactly the thing I needed to get me going because it liberated me from the road blocks of preplanned agendas and ideas.

I haven’t had nearly the time to work on them that I imagined I would but I’ll keep working on them, ever so slowly.

I just now finished the rough draft of No.3 (Saturday) and drew some new cards for the No.4 story challenge yesterday.

They look like this:

Step 1: I pulled one Spark card (adventure story) and used the two Riff cards and one Connect card to string together my opening sentence: “The secretary felt like a painting.”

By the way, my opening sentence for story No.3. was “Her arm moved like a drinking song” and it was a detective story.

2. I haven’t figured out the answers to the purple card questions yet. But we picked “secretary” from the Riff card so…the main character will likely be a female secretary.

3. Write the title: “The Path Into Wildwood” which sounds kind of hoaky to me but this turns out to be a fantasy-type of adventure story based on the fact that…

4. Characters and Conflicts cards were pulled and…

…there’s a character with wings. Que the fairies. Our adventure will have wings (and a time machine).

4. Random images to incorporate: a knotted rope, a rainbow on wet pavement and shipping containers.

Challenge No3. was titled “All My Love Stories Have Happy Endings” and developed into a story about a character based on the Dead Files show’s former-NYPD-homicide-detective Steve DiSchiavi, except he’s a love coach in my story instead of a NYC detective. My in-laws used to love that show and would want to watch it whenever they visited us. Anyway, the love coach befriends a female detective who isn’t a good as a detective as he is as a love coach and they solve a double homicide together. (If I ever create a master page for this project, I’ll add the #3 set of cards there.)

Anyway…while the world falls apart, let us write.

Developing Translations

April 28, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

I’m finishing up two other poetry books today, serendipitously both combined works of poems and essays, albeit each organized differently. One is La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge, Poetry y ostras movidas by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and the other is Marilyn: Essays & Poems by Heidi Seaborn. For the most part, I have liked the essays better in de Alba’s book and like best the Seaborn poems that delve into Marilyn Monroe’s biography, although Seabourn’s investigations into her own personal insomnia are interesting, there’s just a lot of that to read through.

But last week I found out my friend, the poet Ann Cefola, has a new book of translations available with the French poet Hélène Sanguinetti, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else, so that book has been moved to the top of my to-read stack.

To launch the book Beautiful Days Press hosted a transnational, bilingual poetry reading between Cefola (in Long Island, New York) and Sanguinetti (in Arles, France) held on Zoom with attendees from all over the world.

The publisher began by quoting from prior reviews calling Cefola’s prior translations of Sanguinetti “splendidly nuanced” and created “with scrupulous fidelity.”

Which sounds like well-made translations to me and I’m fascinated with this whole process of translation, especially as it was described in this Zoom reading.

Cefola talked about how Sanguinetti’s words have “muscle” and that “they struggle on the page.”

Sanguinetti and Cefola then each read the same section, first Sanguinetti in French and then Cefola in English, Sanguinetti beginning using a finger drum and that followed by a very impassioned reading.

I was able to attend the first Cefola/Sanguinetti reading years ago in Los Angeles for their first book-length effort (Hence This Cradle). Back then we gathered at the Otis College of Art and Design and it was 2007, which seems like many lifetimes ago in the world of Hélène Sanguinetti.

Based on the comments of the attendees on the Zoom call, I will be expecting a collection of experimental quest poems. One reviewer called it a mock-epic. Sanguinetti talks about the quest being the “adventure of our lives.”

After they both read from the book, one attendee said the poem was “lovely to the ear in English and French.”

When asked about how Cefola works with Sanguinetti as a translator, Cefola said “the tracks are there” and that she understood how different English was with its often harsh, Anglo-Saxon sounds. Her job was to mediate between the English and the French but in doing so she had to get “rid of a lot of prepositions that make French so lyrical and beautiful.”

Cefola said her first pass was to capture “accurate words” and then a second pass was made to choose words that “fit the sound,” words that would “resonate” with Sanguinetti’s French.

Cefola admitted she wanted to make Sanguinetti sound more lyrical in the beginning but Sanguinetti told her “this is not what I’m doing,” that Sanguinetti wanted “a struggle on the page” and so Cefola had to “let her work be difficult” and in doing so she had to “set aside [her] own traditions.”

Which is a larger exercise (and lesson) in human understanding and empathy.

Another attendee asked about the idea of a bridge being used as a symbol in the book and Sanguinetti talked about how it could illustrate courage and the unknown. Cefola later told me that “the broken bridge is also about the writing process” and how the “rider has to make leaps even if the way ahead is ‘broken.’”

Sanguinetti says “Alparegho” is an invented word that is both “similar to myself” and “similar to nothing” and she talked about paradox, which feels like much of her work to me.

She noted with mild frustration that people have told her they understand her poems better when she reads them aloud. And the performance of her poems is definitely worth watching but the look of her words on a page is equally interesting.

She then showed us an abstractly human-formed sculpture. She said she makes objects with clay and plaster and this was a character she made covered in yellow acrylic paint with a bird’s head and horns. She said she gave it a red stain for a heart and added a pebble and a button. When it was done she asked it, “who are you?” And this figure became was a starting-point for her character Alparegho, “a point of departure, half sun, half moon.”

She talked about Alparegho rhyming with the word escargot (and how the book contains a snail’s journey) and the hermaphrodite nature of the character.

As an aside, this point of departure reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe and how her paintings were often influenced by music. The O’Keeffe gift shops in Santa Fe and Abiquiu even sell a CD compilation of some of her favorite pieces, Georgia O’Keeffe, A Musical Perspective, which includes work from Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Stravinsky, Copland, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gershwin and Vivaldi. There’s also a Joel Goodman piece on the CD called “O’Keeffe’s Colors.” I was disappointed the CD booklet did not (or could not) trace specific music works back to certain O’Keeffe paintings. But the bridges that form between music, words and art is yet another kind of translation that is fascinating, and O’Keeffe shared it with other painters, sculptors and photographers. She also developed close friendships with writers.

In a second question to Cefola, she explained more about her translation process, that she doesn’t read the poem in full in French at the begining, that she translates it as she goes, a very “basic translation” and that the poem then “develops like a photograph” in a darkroom.

“I see it as I translate,” she said. In the second pass, Cefola will “fine-tune” the meaning and the language “to convey the spirit to an English-speaking audience. She said “accuracy” was more important than any kind of “meaning” and it’s interesting to think about the fine-lined difference between those two concepts.

Sanguinetti then expressed her admiration for Cefola’s translations, called them “incredible” and said she felt they read better in English than in French to which Cefola interrupted with an emphatic “no, no, no.” Sanguinetti said there was sometimes a word or two that was translated in a way that gave an unintentional meaning but that through the translation process she often discovered aspects of the work she hadn’t seen before.

How great is that? Looking forward to reading this book.

More reviews and a synopsis: https://asterismbooks.com/product/alparegho-like-nothing-else

To see a recording of the book launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8HPP10pdLk

Purchase the book here.

Discovering Brian Eno and Oblique Strategies

April 17, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Like I said on Cher Scholar, I am now publishing blog alerts and new content on Substack due to recent political and news events. So discovering a three-hour Brian Eno documentary (“The Man Who Fell to Earth”) last week feels like a good moment of refreshment for Big Bang Poetry. Some fresh projects, a fresh bulletin board.

Not only was the documentary long, but it only covered 1971-to 1977!! Monsieur Big Bang is a Brian Eno fan and picked it out to watch. Whenever we talk about Roxy Music, he will say “Roxy Music was better with Brian Eno in it.” And now I understand why he feels this way (although I still like the later-day Roxy Music).

This post could almost cross-pollinate with Cher Scholar in the ongoing arguments over the use of voice-manipulation-technology in “Believe” (and also Eno often planning an up-tempo record side and a downbeat side which Cher tried with Closer to the Truth and I hated it), which has a tiny but direct lifeline back to the ethos of Brian Eno, a self-described non-musician who has managed to spend his whole career working with technology in music as an art form in a very commercial space.

The avant-garde’s attraction to technology is one of the main controversies of our time. Like the defenders of “Believe,” the documentary’s talking head pointed to the emotional connections of Brian Eno’s music, one commentator pointing out the way Eno can explore work with machines to produce “great humanity and warmth.”

The documentary also discussed ideological tensions around the idea of virtuosity and yet Eno works with practiced musicians. So it’s complicated. You can feel the threat of AI coming now while watching; and the contempt of craft that comes around every few decades. But there is also something interesting about the idea of play. As was said of Eno and an instrument or machine, he “plays with it versus plays it.” It reminds me of the kind of digital “poetry” that uses vocabulary as a material but words separated from grammatical meanings, making it more a visual art using words like a material object. The same thing could be working here for Brian Eno (he uses sound for art’s sake versus music’s sake) except that I think his work appeals to musicians more than digital poetry appeals to other poets.

The documentary explores early technology experiments with Pink Floyd and Kraftwork and Eno’s work with Roxy Music, Robert Fripp, Cluster, David Bowie and the Talking Heads.

The doc also draws a line from Erik Sartie (and his “sound furniture”) to the chance operations of John Cage (who crosses over to LANGUAGE poetics and mesostics) to Brian Eno’s ambient music. I made a list of albums to listen to and have only yet finished No Pussyfooting (with Fripp).

But there were a few things that really appeal to me about Eno. One was his stance against rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Having grown up romanticizing rebellion (heroizing it even), I’m ready to look at another way.

The other thing was the Oblique Strategies cards, which are all about generating new inputs if you are stuck. He made them with painter Peter Schmidt from their separate notebooks of ideas they used when they were stuck on something.

The randomness of cards, the tactileness of cards has always attracted me. Growing up in a poker-playing house, I was only interested in the cards at a tactile level, the way the sounded on the shuffle, the feel of the slide, the many ways to paint them.)

Anyway, I went looking for these cards on eBay and they are very, very expensive, prior editions going for hundreds of dollars, the original edition for over a thousand. Brian Eno is selling new decks from his website for only $50.

But I decided to dig out some unused business cards in my office closet (who needs them after VistaPrint?) and hand-write my own set. This would also give me a chance to do another archaic thing I love to do: laminate shit.

Considering Eno is a technology artist, the cards are a very beautifully physical tool to use. I love that about the context of the whole endeavor. It reminds me of my own need to play around with browser poems and then hand-write haikus.

Version 1.0.0

The set of 115 cards were written to be recording studio aids for when artists get stuck, when things just are not working. But I think they would be just as useful as writing aids, like the Creative Whack Pack or Stones for the Muse.

Reading them over, I came up with the following example categories and my thoughts about some of the cards:

Shake the creative jar:

Change instrument roles (that sounds interesting)
Abandon normal instruments
Reverse
Use fewer notes (Is that the Emperor talking to Mozart in Amadeus?)
Look at the order in which you do things
Faced with a choice, do both
Convert a melodic element into a rhymical element

Do some abstract thinking:

A line has two sides.
Repetition is a form of change
Always give yourself credit for having more than personality
Do we need holes?

Beginner’s Mind:

Ask people to work against their own better judgement
Use unqualified people
Don’t be afraid of things because they are easy to do
Idiot glee
Question the heroic approach

Some of the Beginner’s Mind ideas do work against our narcissistic tendencies but I’m now questioning some of these impulses, which have been popular for some years now. The problem is that this kind of chaos-creating has got us where we are now socially and politically because it has led us into to a fear of expertise or maybe a distrust of expertise. (This is the essential tug and pull of an artist like Brian Eno).

In truth, we need to beware of our fear of expertise as much as our glorification of it. Because it’s almost like someone is trying to run a country this way and it can cause a massive-scale of suffering. The beginner’s mind is a way to break out of the spell of a creative block, not a system-entire operating strategy (or at least it shouldn’t be). We’ve come this far as humans by figuring things out. I don’t need to understand quantum physics but someone should. And I should respect their understanding that is beyond mine.

Where are the cards for tapping into all that we know and allowing others to contribute their expertise to our enterprise? Not that these cards are the antithesis to that. They’re not.

Jump starting the brain by adjusting the body and other sensory adjustments:

Breathe more deeply
Water
Ask your body
Put in earplugs (a personal favorite)
Shut the door and listen from the outside
Remember the quiet evenings
Twist your spine
Get your neck massaged
Do the washing

Stop stopping (or guarding) yourself (this is a big one):

Don’t be frightened by cliches (I have a poem in a new collection that says the same thing)
Allow an easement (I think this might make more sense to a songwriter)
Honor thy error as a hidden intention (the power of failure)
What would your closest friend do?
What wouldn’t you do?
Discard an axiom
What mistakes did you make last time?
Emphasize the flaws
Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them (one of the laws of mining for comedy)
Go to an uncomfortable extreme and then move back to a comfortable place
Be less critical more often
Accept advice
What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate. (honesty, truth)
Trust the you of now
Courage? (perhaps the most valuable card in the deck)

What Is Poetry: To Reveal the Self or Disclose the World?

April 9, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

This is our last blog post covering questions about what poetry may be. We ran out of Elisa New questions (from the Harvard Emily Dickinson MOOC) in the last post. This question is a bonus question I cobbled together somewhere between reading about Gary Snyder and Jack Spicer last year, a question poised somewhere between the Confessional/Beat poets (who make appeals from the self) and the LANGUAGE poets (who try to reveal a reality which does not include ego-driven ideas of the self).

I find this a very interesting, advanced question: what is the purpose of poetry, to reveal the personality or to disclose the world as authentically as we can (in all its scary nebulousness), to explore our many personas or to abandon the idea of individuality altogether?

Poetry camps each feel very strongly about this. And, as you can predict, I hate to take sides in these poetry matters. Again, how can you choose? Like all these attempts to define what poetry is and what poetry does, there are easy cases to be made outside of any staid definition.

If we’re honest, most humans can’t really function outside of a sense of self, despite the precariousness of the self in any biological sense. Psychologists can show how and why we construct our ideas of ourselves so we can mentally move through the world. And we need the idea of other selves to help us come to terms with the mysteries of human behavior in others.

But some (very Zen) humans can also operate with a more fluid sense of self, of being part of a collective self (without feeling threatened by losing the assurance of an ego). Other people need a strong sense of self, a bolster that helps them understand where they begin and end in the world. And then some people just want to think of themselves as the center of the universe.

So this determines the kind of poetry each type of person needs to write.

It’s probably a healthy practice to try both kinds of consciousnesses and write poems that explore each point of view (or pointlessness of view).

After all, without personalities to communicate from and to why bother? On the other hand, with an intransigent sense of self, you are going to get stuck in the pointlessness of that as well. Without being willing to a kind of fluidity and openness to changing your mind, why try to communicate with others? Because if your goal is just to force your perspective on everybody else, you are doomed to fail and feel alienated as a result.

What Is Poetry? One Moment or an Eternity

April 3, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

We are to the last of our Elisa New questions from the Emily Dickinson MOOC. We have one more bonus question later but this is the last in New’s string of musings to her students about what poetry is or how we can define it.

This last question is long: “does a poem live more fully in one distinct moment of performance, like a theatrical performance, like a dance performance? Or does a poem live across time, such that any one performance is inadequate to what the poem actually is?”

Unlike how poems were originally transferred from person to person before the printing press was invented, and unlike how music, theatrical and dance performances operate as one-of-a-kind, communal experiences, poetry can also be transmitted by the technology of books, its own machine of mediation.

So “performance” takes a different meaning if you consider the “performance” on the page. How does a poem perform across and down the white space of paper and across pages? A private reading is also a kind of performance in your own head, in your own imagination. You are the eternal performer in all your readings.

Live events are communal events. Who hasn’t felt the energy of being part of an enthusiastic audience? Any piece of work that has been preserved and then experienced in another time and place through a mediated device is a different experience. Just as experiencing the plays of Shakespeare are unique to their time as opposed to their very first performances. The cultural context has changed. Time changes culture which changes the context of reading any art.

The media also affects the experience, changes in books, new technologies. Watching a video on MTV in the 1980s is a different experience than watching it on YouTube. Hearing AI read a poem aloud is quite different than hearing a monk read it centuries ago. A paperback book is different than a computer printout which is different than a book that was handwritten. These are both intellectual and emotional differences. They land differently in our heads and hearts.

Are all these pieces of art different if differently experienced? They may use the same words from context to context and medium to medium. Does even the reader change what is read? I recently read a allegory for fandom that described two people riding a roller coaster. Their bodies experience the same ride in the same objective way but one loves the ride and one hates it. Their interpretations are based on their personalities and expectations of pleasure.

So one set of words could have infinite performances across time and media, and infinite performances even in one moment across the array of an audience.

What Is Poetry: Is a Poem a Container?

March 19, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

We have three more of these to do, three more Elisa New questions from her Emily Dickinson MOOC many years ago. This time we have two related questions she asked: Is a poem a container that holds a set of meanings or is it an expansion or dissemination that defies all containment?

I feel like this must be the easiest question she’s ever asked us. Because nothing is a container. Not even a Tupperware container. And yet…poems can be usefully seen as tight little containers (compared to novels, for example).

Maybe formalists build poems to be containers. But nothing we really do or say can be hermetically sealed. Even, I would argue, if we never ever share that poem with a single other person. It disseminates and expands into us as creators.

Like man, no poem is an island. And yet it is truly maddening for some people to think about how porous the borders of all things are, even their own skin.

Often people rely on black and white thinking, probably the most popular coping mechanism devised by the human mind for all of time. But like trying to seal the unsealable, black and white thinking is very unreliable, if not just plain self-sabatoging.

Things are not either yes or no. They are always yes and no.

I learned this at a very young age. It’s a story that has to do with a family member with depression and it’s not a story I can tell in a forum like this but suffice it to say the experience taught me a foundational lesson in what we call a paradox: two seemingly contradictory facts often can be, nonetheless, true at the same time.

And not only did I learn this lesson at a very young age, I also found out that once you see a paradox in one place, you can’t help but see them everywhere. It’s all or nothing. Which is why my thinking often hops from a definitive statement to “well, but except for this….”

This is the kind of thing that sends men out babbling into the street. It’s mentally hard to reconcile with. It’s emotionally hard to reconcile with. Enter black and white thinking. As I see it, people have three choices in this world when dealing with life’s plethora of paradoxes: (1) go nuts, (2) retreat into black and white thinking or (3) do what Georgia O’Keeffe calls “walking on the edge of a knife.” It’s the hardest of the three things for sure.

Speaking for myself I can’t use black and white thinking. It would be a constant argument with reality for me and I don’t have that kind of energy. I also prefer not to go crazy, so that leaves the knife.

And speaking of Georgia O’Keeffe, Gene Hackman who recently passed in Santa Fe, was one of O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe museum’s celebrity supporters, serving on the museum board from 1997 to 2004 and narrating the museum’s video that was played multiple times a day for many, many, many years there. I’ve taken quite a few people to that museum and watched that welcome video so many times. It explains northern New Mexico, my family’s terra sancta, like no other I’ve ever seen. It’s in this video that O’Keeffe talks about walking that knife. And that’s why I’ve always remembered it.

It applies to more than painting and writing. Nothing is simple. Nothing is simply its own self. Nothing is only one way or another. And that is both immensely frustrating and incredible beautiful, as any paradox is.

R.I.P. the great Gene Hackman (and also the great Georgia O’Keeffe).

Turn and Face the Strange Changes

February 20, 2025 / Big Bang Poetry

Well, the world is feeling like a Goya painting right about now. And it’s been a while since I posted. The dregs of 2023 turned into the insanity of 2024 which became the horrors of 2025.

But I’ve been meaning to talk about a stack of books I have on my office floor. Some books I recommend and a book I just can’t break into after many years and many attempts.

My big problem is that I’ve hit up against more pressure that extends my crisis of mission with this blog.

First of all, what does it mean to be a creator in the new world of AI where if you create a poem without AI, could you prove it?

And how can you be a public writer (an Internet writer) in a world where AI scrapes what you create in order to take creativity out of the hands of the creators? My little corner of the universe, rarely visited, has always seemed a perfectly safe corner, secured from a largely disinterested populace. But from scarper bots, not so much. From a government that has ceased to believe in human rights and privacy, very much not so.

Last year ended badly, with the convergence of advice from other writers to protect my online writing. (Actually that advice came during a writer’s retreat in Winslow last spring, which then set to nagging at me). Then there was the scary research being done by Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans about AI (which I could feel myself wanting to avoid in conversation but from which I was unable to stop listening or support the poor soul who was reading the worst of it).

Then there was a novel I chose to read in December about the abuse of social media to kidnap people (which freaked me out enough to made me want to go off the grid immediately), a book which was unfortunately immediately followed by a novel given to me by my bestie for Christmas about smart women who fall for amorous predators (the story did not end well) and other stranger dangers; and add to that a family identity theft, a health scare, government shutdown predictions, threats of job outsourcings and well isn’t that enough?

No. The universe said, I give you 2025: plane crashes, fires, fire-related insurance dystopias, data theft, government coups. Now all my friends are also having a bad year and not just me. Isn’t that swell.

I have to change my life. I have to change how I sell books. I have to change how I distribute my thoughts. I have to accept that my time in that world may have to come to an end. Because I have to remember how I was living before the Internet and social media and free shipping and the world being delivered to my feet.

The fact is the Internet is a very public space, and likely no longer a safe space. There are new articles around instructing us how to make our lives more secure and this has to do with removing our public selves from the Internet and going private. This is, honestly, very challenging for me. I am not a public figure by any means, but I am a public person. I have loved meeting strangers and making connections. I have loved sharing and helping others through words and with my sites and blogs. And I believe, in maybe a very small personal way, I have made a positive contribution. I hear from poets and Cher fans throughout the year and I am moved to help and to be informed how I have helped people in even small, informal ways by an idea or a tone of response.

I’m a helper bee to the core. I had to always make that clear in interviews for admin jobs in Los Angeles, where everyone was looking for gate-keepers. I had a boss at ICANN who literally had to tell me where all the gates where so I could resist helping people. It’s just not my natural disposition. I seek to help. But what does that even mean in a world gone mean?

On the Intro 2 Anthro with Two Humans AI podcast episode Monsieur Big Bang says somewhat significantly that as a person committed to lifelong learning and creating, “I can feel myself disappearing.”

I feel the same way.

The only difference is that I see a small ray of hope where he does not. I think this dystopian situation will push us toward more local and in-person lives again. Speaking for myself, I have taken some small steps to regain stable ground as a person in this world, I have made changes to the stores I shop at, the browser I use, the email service I use. (And doesn’t it seem when you move from email address to email address in this life, or from social platform to social platform, part of your life history disappears with it?) I’ve secured some unsecure things. I now think twice about adopting free services and I now opt to pay for more secure products. I’ve moved a lot of content behind passwords. I’ve printed down important documents and am in the process of removing my content from many cloud-based services.

I am becoming a physical, meat-space person again.

I am also “unfriending” people who seem to be taking delight in the suffering of others right now. Because just being around them leaves me feeling that the world has become a grotesque place. Which maybe it has.

In fact, to motivate myself forward, I’ve instituted Outing Day for myself every Friday. It’s a day where I gather a list of things I would have purchased on Amazon or other delivery sites and I get the hell out of my house and go to brick and mortar stores to buy all my shit, sometimes compromising on what I wanted to accept what I can find. It’s beyond the idea of supporting my local, small businesses. In the last few months, I have seen many ways big national and international corporate companies are failing in their bigness. So it’s just as much about protecting myself as it is supporting smaller things.

This is why on most Fridays you will find me visiting Books on the Bosque, probably the smallest new-title bookstore I have ever been to. I’m making friends with the man at the front desk as I give him my weekly list of books I would like to order. The out-of-print-rest I get now from Thrift Books. (Abe’s is now owned by Amazon.) And then I wait for them to arrive, sometimes for a whole week! Brave new world.

Anyway, aside from all that, here are the books from my office floor I want to talk about today.

The Book I Can’t Read

As part of my cowboy poetry collecting, years ago I bought a very used copy of “The Land” by V. Sackville-West (1927) and every few years I try to read the thing. It’s written in four very long poems (based on the seasons) of very dull impenetrable, tangled blank verse. I am giving up on it yet again, but once in a while I pull it off the shelf and read a random page and somehow that makes more sense.

Recently I did find a cowboy poetry anthology on the shelves of my parents new independent living library in Ohio. I have purchased my own copy and will be attempting that one next.

Black History Month Books

There are a few black writers that I’ve been reading over the last two years in this stack as well. And since it’s Black History Month, an effort currently being attacked, I feel this is a good time to highlight these books. In fact, while I was in the Cleveland area recently I heard a radio DJ there joke that night itself will soon be made illegal because it is so black. He was joking but it’s not really that funny in light of all the books on slavery and civil rights that are being banned from American school libraries as we speak.

Percival Everett is a popular author in my Difficult Book Club (our book list is one of my most popular pages). I recently had a chance to read one of his books of poetry, re:f (gesture) from 2006. I didn’t love it. In fact I mailed it to our group’s Everett superfan over Christmas. It seemed simultaneously thin and unwieldy. But I will definitely keep trying his other poetry and highly recommend his novels (of which I’ve only read three so far but he is one of those authors, like Murakami, Twain, David Foster Wallace, Anne Carson, Albert Goldbarth and Thomas Bernhard that I keep craving every once in a while.)

For my intentionally woke book club (we call it the anti-racist book club), my two St. Louis friends and I read a book of erasure poetry called the ferguson report: an erasure by Nicole Sealy (2023). My two friends are from nearby Ferguson in St. Louis (Black Jack) and they are very heart-invested (as two white catholic school girls who grew up there) in that now mostly-black community. I was from West County, an area between the small suburban cities of Creve Coeur, Maryland Heights and the more affluent Chesterfield. St. Louis (and the state of Missouri) is a pretty racist place so that gives our book club some solidarity. West County tends to be obliviously privileged so that makes me a very proud graduate of the DEI-since the beginning-of-time UMSL college.

The eight poems of the book are lifted from a reprinting of the official Ferguson Report from the riots of 2014. The report itself has been grayed out and a handful of words and letters pulled through. For this reason the book is not like other erasure poems with a higher concentration of words per page. And because the report is not really readable itself, my two friends took the extra step of downloading the report separately and reading it. I was unable to do that last year because I was tied up with trips to Cleveland and the contemporaneous act of losing my mind. But I should because my friends tell me the report was actually a more meaningfully and impactful read than the poems. But that said, we all liked the resulting eight “lifted” poems which are also reprinted in the back. It was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

The book I would most highly recommend, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008) is about the black experience during Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 in New Orleans. The narrative thrust of it, the tribute to the city and the meaning Smith can always draw from public and pop culture events all make the book a amazing read. Poems take the voices of many characters, including a dog named Luther B and the hurricane itself.

It’s heartbreaking and monumental and one of America’s best poem sequences.

What is Poetry: Is the Making of a Poem Largely Interior?

December 12, 2024 / Big Bang Poetry

So we are back to these questions Elisa New posed in the Harvard MOOC on Emily Dickinson. This week’s question is pretty short: is creating poems “largely” interior?

Is anything “largely” interior?

It sure feels that way. But I would argue it really isn’t. I would argue it’s impossibly interior and “largely” exterior. By design or accident.

I keep coming back to this quote , “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

This quote is often misattributed to the French leader Charles De Gaulle but in fact it originated from the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis from “Greek poet’s odyssey”, 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75 (according to Wikiquote).

We are so full of influences, how would we even know where ideas are coming from. That’s why it’s so easily believable to be divine inspiration. You could say maybe the synthesis is largely an interior process. But the edges of that are even fuzzy.

Where do we end and the rest of it begin?

Of course, I’m writing on the other side of the narcissistic outcome of a 2024 U.S. election, so I can see how this idea will lose traction soon, as it is losing ground even as we speak. More self-centered ideas of supreme authorship will come back into popularity, I predict. Actual studies about how the brain works during creativity and the human psychology of knowledge will become suppressed as there seems to be a new surge in locating one’s particular life experience as the center of the universe.

A lifetime of ads telling us we deserve it “our way” has come to envelop belief systems now. Good times.

But I’m asking myself these questions so…yeah.

That awesome print above by Loreillustration can be purchased in various formats on Etsy.