Brian > Recent Status Updates

Practical advice.."Poets, if you find yourselves worrying that your poems are not 'about' political matters, here is my suggestion: every single time you feel that worry, finish your poem, make it as beautiful as you can, and then do some kind of concrete action. Regardless of how poets feel about aesthetic matters, we all agree we are citizens. We have the same obligations to activism and engagement as anyone else."

The "glorious high-wire failure that seems only possible in poetry: making meaning by failing to fully make meaning, by graciously, despairingly, beautifully, capitulating to the ultimate unsayability and ultimate unknowability of it all." (!!)

"I had always allowed my mother to feel her feelings, and I suppose that, to some extent, I had established a system of emotional hierarchy that gave me permission to feel things about my mother's feelings, without over-shadowing them. Her feelings were free-range; my feelings were caged. Her feelings were a heap; my feelings were a pile of salt." !!

"This signal of human presence ought to have made the stars seem less remote and cold, but it managed to have exactly the opposite effect; just like the act of telling ghost stories around a campfire served to magnify the darkness beyond the flames. For a moment-one that she revelled in, no matter what Khouri made of it-it was possible to believe that the interstellar spaces beyond the glass were really haunted."