Poems from the Office (pdf)

One-Line Poems by Kathryn Born

Of interest because it uses office artifacts to create poems
and because the coffee stain on the front cover is an enso
(or the enso on the front cover is a coffee stain).

This is the only example I’ve found. Probably because
office artifacts are not that interesting as a raw material.
“Why not” is what I’d like to know.

January – good time for a trip to the Botanical Garden

Calendars by Annie Finch

Calendars Study Guide

You could learn everything you need to know about meter & scansion by studying these two books.

—If one wished to write poetry of nature, where an audience?
Must come from the very conflict of an attempt to articulate the
vision      poetry & nature in our time.

(reject the human; but the tension of
human events, brutal and tragic, against
a non-human background? like Jeffers?)

Reading: Earth House Hold, by Gary Snyder

Resistance to adding commentary. I M N Amateur. Haven’t read Jeffers.

You think: human is in nature, what else is there, what else could there be? but drawing false distinctions. So where’s the conflict, where’s the “audience”?

What’s a non-human background?

From the Mongol Embassy website:

In their many years of nomadic life, the Mongols have developed their own specific techniques of handling livestock. One technique employs toig, a special coaxing word, which is uttered or rather sung when a ewe is being coaxed into accepting a rejected lamb. The word toig is used with sheep only; for goats, the word is choig; for camels, hoos. In the latter instance, the morin huur (horsehead fiddle) accompanies the singing. While including a ewe to suckle a rejected lamb, the following words, for example, are sung:

The mandarin duck has arrived, The mugwort has sprung up, your udder is full,
Keeping it away, why do you reject it? Toig, toig, toig

This is sung gently, over and over again, until the ewe suckles the lamb. When a mother camel is being coaxed into accepting a rejected or strange calf, it is said to break into tears at the gentle sound of hoos and the enchanting melody of the morin huur, sung and played by someone skilled in the art of casting spells on animals. The words are more than simple calls and have become absorbed into poems and songs.

Happiness is …

one-click WordPress upgrades.

Thank you, Dreamhost.

[Actually, it took a few more clicks, mostly to update the database.]

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 20th century French post-structuralists, are interested in explorations and subversions instead of analytic logic and unified Truth, of which the concept of the rhizome is only part. They contend that the tree – the arboreal structure- is the dominant image of the world; in the image of the tree, the world is categorized by stratification and the illusion of unity. Basically, the complex of roots at the bottom is exploited to support the fruit at the top, which serves only to reproduce additional tree-like complexes, additional hierarchical structures. “Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories.” In opposition to the arboreal is the rhizomatic, which is characterized by the rhizome or fascicular (bundle) root. The rhizome root, like that of grass, is one that moves outward, not upward, in a decentralized fashion to multiply in the places that suit its growth – and some places that don’t.

… the authors say, “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. . . . Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.”

Social Spirituality, by Phil Campanile in
The Best We’re Doing, a Journal of the Good Life Center