multimedia poet from the sticks
To truly be a good person, you have to have low standards. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say a friend shows you an utterly terrible poem that they have just written. You have to be able to read that terrible poem and, because it was written by someone you care about, focus in on the one thing about it you like, and let that one little bit of radiance suffuse the whole poem, so you can say to your friend with utmost sincerity, this is wonderful.
I am not a good person.
Earth Day: what a bizarre concept! How sad that we need to put a day on the calendar to recognize the ground we stand on, the matrix without which we are nowhere and nothing. That said, it has made me reflect this morning on time and the uses to which we put it, as our civilization—a cross between a death cult and a Ponzi scheme—consumes ever more of everything.
Over the past month I’ve been spending more time on web work than I have in years, re-learning WordPress in the course of building a whole new website to welcome people to our square mile of mountain land. Poems have been far fewer as a result, but I don’t mind: it feels like necessary work. As a long-time blogger, writing in public helps me think out a new approach to land management and public relations. But this project wouldn’t have come together in the way it has without all those daily walks I’ve been taking, which have helped me work out a vision for Plummer’s Hollow over the past two years.
How does that happen, exactly? What is it about going for a walk that helps clear out the mental underbrush? The connection between literal and figurative path-finding seems real. And when you are writing about the place where you‘re walking, inspiration starts to feel as literal as an in-drawn breath.
I think the homepage is more or less finished now, if you’d like to go visit. It’s, um, a bit more text-heavy than most website homepages, but you know me. We’ll be using the blog not just for news (its current label in the navigation menu) but to flesh out conservation ideas as well. Pick up a free subscription if that sort of thing interests you.
One thing I never anticipated about growing older is how attached I would become to ordinary possessions, how reluctant I am to replace things that genuinely need to be replaced. I tell myself that this is rational behavior: manufacturing is in a terrible state, that’s not my imagination! Whatever new thing I get will almost undoubtedly be worse. But, like, this perfectly ordinary pair of scissors that I’ve been using to trim my beard and mustache once or twice a week for the past 30 years is getting so dull now that it causes me actual physical pain, yet I still can’t bear the thought of replacing it. Fundamentally, I guess I just don’t hold with the passing of time. It’s wrong and I don’t like it.
Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, but together we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing.
Statement of Solidarity, Writers Against the War on Gaza
I’ve signed. Will you join me?