Robert Hayden / Dudley Randall Centennial Symposium, Wayne State University, April 2-3, 2014. I’ll be talking about Hayden’s “Angle of Ascent” and reading an excerpt from my epic poem in which Hayden’s a character. There’s a more readable PDF at the link, of the screenshot below.
Hope you can make it!
Filed under Universality
On Bay View Beach, Petoskey, Michigan
Bay View Beach, Little Traverse Bay, Petoskey, Michigan
August 30, 2012, shortly after finishing the entire 8th draft of The Parliament of Poets and the Summer Serialization, recovering and trying to clear out my head on the beach down in front of the historic Chautaugua Bay View Association and Terrace Inn, where I stayed.
Filed under Epic
Michigan from a Great Height
Michigan from a Great Height
March 31, 2011
I was climbing with someone up a great hill that became nearly a mountain. It was a beautiful Michigan day, in the afternoon, as we walked through green and open spaces, rising above the trees and forest. I sensed I was in the Upper Peninsula or the northern part of the lower peninsula, looking south.
I reached and stood on a very high hillock at the top of the gentle, sloping mountain, overlooking the land, my companion standing below. All was spread out before me, beautiful and green, blue lakes scattered in the countryside of Michigan.
I awoke recalling that I have had this dream before, perhaps many times, recognizing it as so. It was a very pleasant dream. I felt happy and content, as I was led up toward the top of the rising land. The import was that my guide was showing me something of great moment and beauty, and there it was, spread out and lying below. A glorious land as far as I could see.
Filed under Universality
Borges. A Signature.
Borges. A Signature. June 8, 2010.
Surreal, South American magic fiction kind-of-thing… Of the couple of thousand books I have, I’ve never found any other signed copies… of the thousands of books I’ve read from libraries during my life I’ve never stumbled onto a signed copy… and then to find the only one that is signed by someone I’ve been thinking and writing about for months is strange. I like to think I’m largely a rational person, realizing it’s merely coincidence, but it’s still surreal, given all his surreal, bizarre stories and poems…
Here’s another sample Borges signature, for an incredible $18,000.
The same flourishes of the “g,” capital “B,” and his characteristic upside down “T” at the end. What does that signify? Some transcendent symbol? A mystic alef of his mind? A shakiness in the cramped hand, blindly struggling to sign the book held in the air, held inches from the eye, the way Bob used to? Another blind master…
Why do writers and artists always have to die before their work starts fetching these kinds of prices? Some crude, bourgeois calculation involved.
I’ve scanned it in. Somebody tell me I’m wrong!
“Uncanny,” as a Facebook friend has said. The word surreal keeps swirling around in my head… For some reason, Borges’ story “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” has also kept coming to mind, since my discovery, his search for Attar’s Simurgh, which all connects intimately with a poem I’ve been writing.
There are times when the intuition can surpass and lead aright the rational mind. Perhaps a fellow writer can help us more than we are able to understand, reach out even from across the grave… how non-modern, how contrary to our quotidian, rational assumptions, modernity’s cliches and distortions, petty pieties.
Through the mirror, through the mirror, to the next continent, somehow, through the mirror…
Filed under Universality
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