“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,’ Didion writes. ‘We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.’ She ignores that to forget can be a supreme grace. I treasure all of the diaries I kept when I was a child precisely because of the distance I feel from the girl who wrote them. Seventh grade Alice: ‘It’s totally cool because it’s like we’ve moved on to another level of flirting.’ Eighth grade Alice: ‘You know I’ve been thinking way deep things lately.’ First grade Alice: ‘Dear Alice, I don’t know. Love, Alice.’ ”I have always been a person who is ‘sensitive,’ and I take too long to get over everything. Reading old journals and notebooks, I am reminded that feelings are, in their essence, immediate, and they pass over us like shadows. All the words I collect are artifacts of sentiments that do not exist and could not even be conceived of again—ideas that once desperately needed to be expressed disappear, leaving husks of language that I save, I care for.”

– Alice Bolin, with thanks to leopoldgursky
(via growing-orbits)

From ‘Deep Fried’, Sid Miller #poem (Taken with instagram)

“2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.”

–

6 tips on writing from John Steinbeck (via explore-blog)

The full list is geared more towards writers of prose than poetry, but there are obvious parallels. Consider ‘scene’ as ‘image’, for example… 

You have your orders. Perform! (Taken with instagram)

“After everything it’s like the tune
we keep humming over and over
mostly for how it makes us remember
somewhere back in our shimmering youths,
before the household and the furniture,
before the children and the mortgage and the pets;
back when it was only the two of us,
only each other to abide, obey,
suffer and satisfy, endure, survive;
only one another to have and hold
and that hush that would sometimes settle between us,
and the light—how it turned silver in the dark,
till everything we touched turned into gold.
In time we came to know that tune by heart.”

–

—Thomas Lynch, ‘Alchemy’ from Walking Papers: Poems

Via W. W. Norton 

Got a copy of Kayo Chingonyi’s ‘Some Bright Elegance’ last week, from the man himself. Recommended. One of the bright new voices of Black British poetry, via Salt Modern Voices. Taking it in to my Speaking Volumes workshop today. (Taken with instagram)

“The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.” (via Descriptive Camera)

The poet, the photographer and the technology geek inside me are doing a little happy dance in my head. Together. 

“Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your level of enthusiasm measures up to others. If you like something so much that a casual mention of it makes your whole being light up like a halogen lamp, if hearing a stranger fondly mention your favorite book or game is instant grounds for friendship, if you have ever found yourself bouncing out of your chair because something you learned blew your mind so hard that you physically could not contain yourself — you are a geek”

–

The Mary Sue defines what it means to be a geek, a beautiful definition that falls (un)surprisingly close to what it means to find purpose and do what you love.

(↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart)

““In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense — to regain the knowledge — that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life. The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.””

– Ursula K. Le Guin, via Hope, Or Where Other People May Live Another Kind Of Life / @rgreco

Sid Miller, On Morning (Taken with instagram)

by Kathleen Lynch

1. Decide you must.
2. Develop deep respect
   for feather, bone, claw.
3. Place your trembling thumb
   where the heart will be:
   for one hundred hours watch
   so you will know
   where to put the first feather.
4. Stay awake forever.
   When the bird takes shape
   gently pry open its beak
   and whisper into it: mouse.
5. Let it go.

Aperture and No 26, Rathbone Place , W1. Both cafés. Aperture gets extra points for doubling as an analog camera shop. Win. Note to self: investigate further later. (Taken with instagram)

“The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent as they have to speak.”

–

Spinoza (Dutch Philospher)

via Ando Perez

“Most people don’t know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking. They pay more attention to that than to what the other person is saying, and none at all to what really matters: the Being of the other person underneath the words and the mind. Of course, you cannot feel someone else’s Being except through your own. This is the beginning of the realization of oneness, which is love. At the deepest level of Being, you are one with all that is.”

– Eckhart Tolle (via thecollectedintellect)

Sid Miller, Cayenne Pepper and Other Rotting Vegetables (Taken with instagram)

(via Should I Check My Email? – The Rumpus.net)

Chortle. Guffaw.

venturepoetry:

Shortlist Readings: Venture Awards 2012 (by ventureaward)

I recently had the joy of judging the inaugural Venture Award— celebrating new voices in poetry through a pamphlet competition… 

“A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world; he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge. Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation. I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me. One role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done.”

– E. B. White on the Role and Responsibility of the Writer (via Brain Pickings)

“Whiteonwhite plays with the motifs of resource scarcity and mineral extraction in more surprising ways, too, notably in the most intriguing problem Holz encounters: a language ration. Each person in City-A has a finite lifetime supply of each word, but nobody can know exactly what their individual ration for a given word is until it has run out, rendering the word forever unutterable. People are left to say “convey beaten dairy” when they have used up their rations of “please pass the butter.” Holz fears he might be close to running out of some commonly used words and tries to record them before it’s too late. In the world of whiteonwhite, the supply of language is limited, but the movie’s supply of time is infinite.”

–

From this morning’s feed reading: Paris Review – White Noir, Jane Yager

A film live-edited by computer directed by an algorithm? A ration on language that pushes towards uncommon usage? Sounds like something that needs to be experienced…

thewaysoundtravels:

Sonnymoon – Just Before Dawn (by PlugResearch)

I don’t really do music videos these days. I remember my MTV/Box/iDTV (anyone remember Rap City?) days and they were a long, long time ago. That said, every now and then something floats up past the I-don’t-have-time-for-this-I-have-work-to-do filter. This stands as one of the more stunning music videos I’ve seen for a fair while. A series of seemingly random captured moments that appeal to the street photographer in me. Beautiful. 

Dear internet— one day I got bored and started a music blog with a couple of the guys. It’s currently being raised on a steady diet of Soundcloud and YouTube embeds, but I’m hoping that one day it might just grow up and do something intelligent. This is not an indication of the fact that I don’t already have too much to do, or that I don’t already have enough virtual real estate. It is in fact an attempt to test the hypothesis that everyone needs an outlet. End public service announcement.   

“It’s true, Time is everything. Forget God. My teaching artist friend Leah and I have discovered that all things lead back to time, and everything we think about is hinged on our understandings of time, or our lack of understanding. So we developed an entire unit of study based on how people across disciplines describe and experience time. From Einstein to Dylan Thomas, Ben Franklin to Roethke, students explored the poetics of time and found ways to express how time is experienced in their own lives.”

– STANZABREAK: THE POETICS OF TIME

“If time is food for memories, a calendar is a buffet of your time. If you don’t get in line and help yourself constantly, others will help themselves—to your time. They’ll be responsible for your memories.”

– Your time via Practically Efficient

“The world is a complex place. The only way to deal with it is is to simply – to create abstractions, or as I would say, to identify and recognize patterns in the phenomena. When we teach, we often take the short-cut of teaching these simplifications directly, rather than having students identify and recognize them for themselves. This may be more efficient – there’s no shortage of studies that show this – but each time we teach a simplification, we make it harder for students to recognize new or alternative patterns in the same phenomena. But complex phenomena are dynamic, changing, and the simplifications are rarely valid for long.”

– Badges: talking at cross purposes? ~ Stephen’s Web via @rgreco

“My ideal reader is the host of my brilliant predecessor poets as well as those contemporary poets whose work I passionately admire. On the other hand, if an ordinary person who seldom reads poetry can’t make heads or tails of what I’m doing, I think I’ve failed.”

– How a Poem Happens: Fleda Brown

“That’s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor’s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn’t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren’t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer’s understanding of it as well.”

–

Beware the Digital Disruptors: They’re Coming for Your Industry

Morning Instapaper read. And what does digital disruption mean for our industry/industries, dear writers/poets/publishers/literature professionals?

“In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

–

Letters of Note: C. S. Lewis on Writing

Dear students: don’t say I didn’t tell you so. 

BAT EYES (by TheVoicesProject)

I know Dan Prichard from his previous incarnation as a British Council Literature Department head in Singapore. He dropped me a line with the link to this short feature via Facebook, where it lay languishing in my inbox for a solid week or two before I picked up on it. Note to self: when Dan Prichard sends you some of his work to view, drop everything and watch it immediately. More info about the Voices Project via http://www.freshink.com.au/

Now feening for a ticket to Singapore. (Tentatively promised myself a trip to Australia next time I’m in that part of the world…)

The Burning House— before you start, it’s not a consumerist thing. Yes, it’s an ode to things, but it’s also an engaging photographic project. Sure, there’s a certain body of people represented here, mostly creatives; there’s a surfeit of retro (read:hip) and more modern camera tech, iPhones and laptops, moleskine journals, tablets and so on. And yes, it’d be an even more powerful social document if it sampled a from wider pool. Regardless, it’s certainly worth a follow.

On the subject of the very public awareness of my workaholism (cue joking references to clones and machines): 

“It clearly must be a myth because it’s not possible to write such good poetry as yours without taking time out.”

Oops. Next action: schedule more writing time.  

“Pay more attention. More than that. More. More more more more more. Read things that you don’t think are poetry. Listen to your gut. Don’t listen to your gut. Get a broken heart, really bad. Memorise poems and say them by heart. If you can, do not believe in shame guilt, or debt. Give everything you can away. Develop some self-awareness. Be humble, with a secret huge ego. There is more out there: attend, attend. Believe there will be more for you. This will not be the last poem. Be less precious. Be willing to change your mind about what you’re making. Be willing to change your mind about what poetry can be.”

–

Writer of the Month – April – Eireann Lorsung – Writing East Midlands

Advice to emerging writers courtesy of Eireann Lorsung.

Eloquence in Times of Crisis – poems from Barbican Young Poets. Colour me proud. Want a copy? Holler and we’ll see what can be done. No promises for international mailings! (Taken with instagram)

(‘To Do’ via Swiss Miss)

Pinwheel:

In short: Pinwheel= the Facebook of geo-location and web based maps. 

Geo-location. Supposedly the new new, but I’ve never really been compelled to “check in”. Foursquare was interesting for about a week. Path was deleted from my iPhone after having been buried in a folder since installation. The most used ‘location based resources’ in my life are provided by Google maps. But hello, Pinwheel. Easy on the eye and no real learning curve. Plus, the challenges are engaging. May actually look towards using this in a writing exercise somehow… 

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

– Mary Oliver (via paperlover)

Paper by FiftyThree (by FiftyThree)

Coming soon to an iPad near me…

@InuaEllams: are you paying attention?

“I find that my interactions with students demand what the artistic process demands—reativity, compassion, awareness, and hard work. My students inspire and humble me. I learn from them just as much as I teach them. I do see teaching as an integral artistic process in itself.”

–

BigCityLit.com: Maya Pindyck

Mmmhmmm…

iPad, keyboard and WriteRoom = happiness. (Taken with instagram)