studio

Now is the time to write about roses. My friend, Kim, painted this scene, and she cherishes it’s dramatic colour. It immediately brought to mind the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, called The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Between the image, the story, thoughts on consecration, and news from Europe of desecration, I […]

Here, freedumb fighters, already free, seek to be free. There, Vladimir Faire la Putain, seeks to free those who are already free. Be on guard against the union of those two sets! Lao Tzu writes: People whose power is real fulfill their obligations; people whose power is hollow insist on their claims. Be on guard

…I honour the moments when words fail.

It’s the last day of January. Housemouseish, I nibble at the edges of this and that. Write? Perhaps not. Edit? Here and there. Listen to music? It’s in the background. I continue work on and contemplate Silence(d), my altered book/poem, in which I demonstrate silence by excising, silence by redacting. Yesterday, I wrote a letter

A vow of silence for a lifetime or a day is observance, renunciation. Add ill intent and it becomes subservience, humiliation. In July 2021 Timothy Snyder wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/magazine/memory-laws.html in the New York Times magazine. Last night, CBC played https://www.thisamericanlife.org/758/talking-while-black . In between I’ve been working on a talmudic study of silence, of how we silence,

Tristan makes the most of the impossible Toronto real estate market by imaginatively using the 560 square feet he lives in with my daughter, Maja, and their 2 children under 2, Mila and Elsie. I think there might be a useful blog in there. It got me thinking about my own oft-neglected blog and how

I can find innumerable reasons to not write, even an innocent babe. She made us wait six days beyond the nine months, then came as a Thanksgiving. I have made time for Elsie, the soft sun, and the golden leaves to inspire and have distilled an elegiac couplet from the morning’s scribblings. Born without storm

The earth is our home, recent rocket-men notwithstanding, and we don’t treat it with the love and respect she deserves. We are known by our actions and our actions are informed by our words and our words manifest our thinking. I am working on a land acknowledgement that will become part of the forest, whether

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet, drops the gauntlet with “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”. Ah no, gauntlet is too genteel a word, a word with a history, a word that implies the rules of fair play. Hindi drops a big fat rock, cracking the bones of my feet, my