and the winner is…

…THE 2009-2010 FILAMORE TABIOS, SR. MEMORIAL POETRY PRIZE!

3. Takagamine, Where I Am Living Then

Excerpt from a poem by Philip Whalen:

Morning zazen evening drunk
Mosquito-hawk legs thinner
Than a hair between
Legs thin as a
Hairy laugh tail
. . . . . . . . . . . . .O for the tongue the Harp of Paradise!

[I had to insert the periods because I don't know how to do blockquote in WordPress.]

you go girl!

Taking a break from “the increasingly alarming writing project,” I have scanned the internet for something inspiring, and have finally found it. I want to share it with you:

By Gugug.

otoliths 15

On Halloween: Issue 15, the Southern Spring Issue of Otoliths is now live. It’s alive! ALIVE!

pagmamano

Eileen: I get “pagmamano” a lot, lately. Primarily, I think, because of the increasingly grey hair. It’s a strange feeling indeed.

Halloween

Samhain. Dia de los Muertos. All Saints (coming up). Remember the Dead.

“I Remember” by Devendra Banhart.

(Yes, I’ve posted this video before, but somehow it seems more appropriate than all the ghoulies and ghosties)

ringu

Dare I watch “The Ring” (Western version) tomorrow night?

Ringu (Japanese)

losing touch

I’ve lost touch with, I’d say, more than 3/4 of the people on my bloglist. Things are so different now than they were when I first started blogging in 2000. I was taking risks from day-one at that point — and frankly I produced quite a bit of bad and mediocre poetry. But I also wrote some pieces that I liked.

Best of all, it was a period of discovery and exploration. I don’t feel quite that way anymore — not because I don’t think there is more to explore, but I seem to have lost the heart for it. Funny, but I think I’ve lost the courage to write bad poetry (in public)! Somehow, taking that kind of risk was directly proportionate to the amount of delight I experienced in the process of writing. I was really…enchanted… with the process then.

Perhaps it’s time to make some changes — to rethink this whole thing.

I’ve tried moving all my poetry/writing stuff over to Prau (which originally was created just to hold information about the book, and reviews and other responses to it), but I’m not sure that is working. And I’m not even so sure that the Corporeal poems should go onto a separate blog. I think Eileen has a point about life and poetry being all one. Perhaps I’m dividing my poetry-blogging into too many units.

A blog is a funny thing. In a way, each is a language/visual “body” of its own. Each blog has its “skin,” and contains it’s own little corpus. –Or perhaps “body” is claiming more for a blog than it deserves. Maybe a little “stage” or venue from which we perform is more appropriate. I think that some people (I’m thinking of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Karri Kokko) do well with splitting off their work into a number of blogs, each existing within a separate idea-stage. I’m just not so sure it’s working for me.

Well, a blog can be many things to many people. Blogging for me, initially, was a sort of epistolary performance art. Letters/postcards to friends and strangers. Fragments of my imperfect self in the process of transforming, collaborating, dying, becoming.

biorhythms

Since leaving my job, my biorhythms have gone kind of haywire. Inexplicably, I get sleepy early, can’t stay awake past 9pm (that’s early for me). But the next night I might go to sleep late. In most cases, I wake up extremely early, as early as 3:30am one day, or 6:30am the next.

nevertheless…

…the “problems” arising from meditation seem to be primarily problems of awareness. Stuff you thought you wanted to know…but turn out to be not so pleasant upon actual experience. Still, insights from meditation have helped me to survive some of the toughest periods in my life. Generally, awareness is a better deal — but really, when you get down to the core, meditation is not the spaced-out hypnotic fun ride a lot of people think it is (admittedly, occasionally it’s fun, but just as often uncomfortable or painful).

maybe enlightenment sucks

…for some people, anyway. The kind of article Buddhists hate to read. Doubting Thomas, by Duncan Barford.

the tow

So, as I set off on the metaphorical road to my new life, my real-life car battery dies, and won’t hold a charge. Hah!

I write this while waiting for a tow.