In the first of eight lectures from the workshop, Kyger talks extensively of Jack Spicer, of whom I recently became aware when reading the Evergreen Review Reader, 1957-1966 earlier this year. Spicer had significant interaction with Richard Brautigan, and now I think I need to seek out more of his work.
Reading
I finished my Brautigan book, which included Trout Fishing In America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. My brain is now wonderfully twisted.
Writing
I managed another poem or two this week, but most of my creative energy went to writing code.
[A bumblebee sunning itself on one of our steps, after presumably being drenched in a recent thunderstorm.]
The particular insanity has sublimated into my life and become indistinguishable from the general insanity which permeates society like background radiation or herpes.
The first poem in The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”. I think we can safely say at this point that the machines watching over us are doing so with neither love nor grace.
Writing
I have so far this month written around seven poems and poem fragments, which is outstanding considering *gestures at the world*.
While it may be a stretch to say that warm weather has arrived, seasonably-appropriate weather has arrived, and compared to the recent cold snap, it feels warm. In other words, we are getting historically-average weather which, compared to the past years of excessive heat, feels unseasonably cold.
My partner and I just finished starting several dozen seeds. We were a couple of weeks late in this task, but given the extended growing season, thanks to the aforementioned global warming, it shouldn’t affect our yield.
Work landed on me with both feet this past week, and I ended up working some extremely long days, and as this post goes live late Saturday afternoon, I am still working. Thus my creative output was much diminished.
Reading
I am more than halfway through The City and the City, which I am still quite enjoying. I haven’t made much progress in Trout Fishing In America or The Wretched of the Earth, but I hope to change that in the upcoming week.
The new work project kicked off this week and so far, so good. I am rebuilding my ServiceNow skills which fell by the wayside since the end of my previous project using the platform. It’s good to be back in this particular saddle.
It is good that I am still gainfully employed, because this is shaping up to be quite an expensive year. The most recent money sink is part two of waterproofing the basement. Last September a crew came in and wrapped the uphill side of the house foundation in something a lot like swimming pool liner. In past years, and with increasing frequency, the basement walls on the uphill side of the house would show dampness, and sometimes actually leak water into the basement. Our neighborhood is built on an old brickyard, and the ground is basically a gigantic pile of sand.
The effects were immediately noticeable in the basement as a significant drop in the pervasive moist and humid feel. Since then we had not had any days with heavy precipitation by which we could put the waterproofing to the test.
That all came to an end a week ago, with a hard, drenching downpour which covered my basement floor with several gallons of sandy water. I found a place where the water seemed to be bubbling up through a crack in the floor, so I called the crew who had waterproofed the exterior wall and said that the thing that they had predicted – water finding its way in UNDER the house – had come to pass, and it was time to implement part 2 of the project: Dig a drainage trench around the interior perimeter of the foundation, and install a sump pump which would tie in with the previously-installed exterior drainage.
Then last weekend we had another deluge and I again had water in my basement. This time I found the exact place where it was coming in through the intersection of floor and basement wall. It was a small spot, barely an inch across. And water was coming in like the house was built on a natural spring.
When the company representative came over to assess the situation, I pointed out places where the basement floor had been heaving (upward buckling and occasional cracks) over the past five or so years. I was worried that this might crack the foundation, but the rep calmly pointed out that (1) in old houses, the basement floor sits INSIDE the foundation; the foundation doesn’t sit ON the basement floor. And (2) the floor, which I thought was at least six to eight inches of concrete, was actually somewhere between one and three inches thick. Old Michigan houses like mine (built in 1905) originally had dirt floors, and the current basement floor was simply a layer of concrete poured on the dirt and left to harden. Thus the floor cracking and heaving, while inconvenient, was far from catastrophic. And also reasonably easy to repair, should the need arise.
The other new money sink is a new stove. The old one, a thirty-year-old Magic Chef, finally gave up the ghost. The stovetop burners still worked, but the oven portion no longer heated anything.
I suppose it is a sign of my age that I am excited to have a new stove, and now I want to cook ALL THE THINGS! But I am also excited that a crew is going to jackhammer a big trench in my basement floor. Age ain’t nothing but a number.
Reading
Continuing on from last week, I have three books open – The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, and The City and The City by China Mieville. They should keep me occupied for the first couple of weeks of the month.
Writing
April is National Poetry Month, and so far I have managed to pump out a rough draft of a poem each day this week. I am also plugging away at the short story from last week. I expected to complete the draft this past weekend, but the mundane world intruded. I can’t complain – I am writing again.
Subject: Spiritual Beings, Music
Setting: Urban
Genre: Literary Fiction
Listening
Dave Van Ronk singing “Luang Prabang”. Given the rise in imperialistic fervor instigated by Elon Musk, Musk’s catamite Donald Trump, and Trump’s MAGA brownshirts and bootlicks, now is a good time for some old protest songs. Empire is always bad, in all places, in all contexts, and there is nothing heroic about dying for oligarchs.
“Being Non-Transactional: Beyond ‘What’s in it for me?’” (Aurelien) – This is a very good essay on individual vs. collective ethics, and how the gap between the two, or an absence of the latter, makes collective action difficult.
[Poe, enjoying a rare warm afternoon on the front porch.]
The current state of things is a constant mental tinnitus eating up valuable brain space which could be much better put to use reading, writing, and appreciating the small moments of beauty which surround us. I have a great many, very negative thoughts about the current state of politics and economics, but those will have to go into their own posts. For right now, the weekly updates will be more about creative pursuits and simple pleasures.
Reading
I have three books open right now: Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, and China Mieville’s The City and the City. All three of them are blowing my mind in different ways. I can see that I will need to switch from concurrent to consecutive reading if I am to make it through them and retain something of what I have read.
Writing
Much to my surprise, I wrote something this week! As of this writing, I have most of a short story based on a writing prompt from a couple of weeks ago. It’s called “The Other Up” and I think it has legs. We will see when I finish the draft, hopefully this weekend.
[Red Maple buds against an overcast afternoon sky.]
Another hectic week. Not a lot accomplished outside of work and working out. I spent what little down time I usually have helping my partner set up a new office, which will allow her to move her business supplies out of the storage unit where they have gathered dust for the past two years. That, and some unexpected house maintenance tasks, filled my days and my mind.
Reading
Immediately after acquiring Melissa Wray’s poetry collection Small Gestures, I read it, and it was beautiful! Next I read Portuguese writer Maria Judite De Carvalho’s Empty Wardrobes, which I received a few years back, when I had a subscription to Two Lines Press of the Center for the Art of Translation. Money and space are tighter now so I had to let that subscription lapse, but I still have over a dozen books from Two Lines Press which I have not yet read. And a pile of books from Deep Vellum, and another from Open Letter, and another from Ugly Duckling Presse, and a large pile from And Other Stories, which is the only publisher to whom I have a subscription.
Friday morning (yesterday, when this is posted) I treated myself to an early morning at Scorpion Hearts Club, where I drank two delicious lattes and cracked open Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth, which I picked up a few months ago from Black Dog Books and Records. Only a dozen pages in, and this book is blowing my mind wide open.
Writing
One day I will have the time, energy, and attention span together to write something creative and good, but today is not that day.
[Red maple buds on a twig, seen against a hazy blue sky.]
It’s been an interesting week. The slide into an official, full-blown Christofascist ethno-state continues. I say “continues” because all of American conservatism has been heading in this direction for about the past 248 years, and REALLY the last 532 years.
The most clear-eyed theory states that, rather than 1930s Weimar Germany, we are seeing the USA mimic the late-1990s, post-Soviet Russia. The oligarchs are stripping the country for parts, and already the damage done in last than two months will take years to correct. The only real solution will be to purge the entirety of MAGA and DOGE, and all similar ideologies, from the world, and tax the wealthy until none of them have the financial resources to get involved in politics at any meaningful level, ever again.
In happier news, I just received the first book published by the Grand River Poetry Collective, Melissa Wray‘s Small Gestures. The Collective has about ten more books in various stages in the publishing queue, and more author inquiries are coming in every day.\
Grand Rapids Poet Laureate Christine Stephens-Krieger has been hard at work setting up opportunities and events for Grand Rapids poets. Two coming up in the near future are:
Sunday, April 6, 2:00 – 4:00 pm: The Power of Poetry Showcase at the Grand Rapids Public Library
Thursday, April 4, 6:00 – 7:30 pm: Grand River Poetry Collective Panel Discussion at the Grand Rapids Art Museum
Reading
I finished The Evergreen Review Reader, which was magnificent, and now I’m on to the next book – Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong, on the recommendation of my partner.
Writing
I have a large pile of old poetry and short stories to investigate to see if any have merit, so that I may edit them. I feel cautiously optimistic and vaguely pessimistic in equal measure.
Oh, we do live in interesting times. Trump and Musk are very efficiently dismantling the American Empire, which is a good thing, but they are doing so by dismantling America, which is a very bad thing. In the event that we ever have elections again, with candidates who are meaningfully distinct from one another and from the current ball of hagfish slime inhabiting the halls of power, I will vote from anyone who dedicates their career to overturning Citizens United, and putting strict caps on all campaign donations and all campaign spending. Spending is not free speech, has never been free speech, and must never be considered free speech. Free speech is only that which is enjoyed, both in principle and in practice, by all Americans equally. So any laws which act as de facto aggregators of power rather than dispersers of power are per se anti-free speech, and therefore pro-fascism.
Reading
Samuel Beckett. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Patsy Southgate. Paul Blackburn. Gary Snyder. Carlos Fuentes. Denise Levertov. Boris Pasternak. All of these writers and dozens more besides, in The Evergreen Review Reader, 1957 – 1966. This book is keeping me sane, for what it’s worth.
Writing
I felt particularly burned out over the past week and so accomplished very little, writing-wise.
Subject: Espionage, Super Powers
Setting: Border Town
Genre: Fantasy
Listening
Otis Taylor and his band with an amazing cover of “Hey Joe”, performed at the Kitchener Blues Festival in August of 2014. I have been a fan of Taylor since I first heard one of his songs on local station WYCE back in the early 2000s.
[The view east from Draper Cemetery in Jackson County.]
After last week’s whirlwind project, which I can’t discuss but during which I learned a LOT of Python, I am completely exhausted and took the last two days of the week off as sick days, for the sake of my mental and emotional health. Twenty years ago I could have recovered from a 70+ hours-in-eight-days marathon of work by getting a single night of sleep. That simply is not the case any more. I need down time.
This past Tuesday we laid my aunt Judy to rest. She was my Mom’s older sister, and the third of the four siblings to pass. I saw many relatives who I had not seen since Mom’s funeral back in the fall of 2021. The family just keeps getting smaller.
Reading
I am about a third of the way through The Evergreen Review Reader, 1957 – 1966. So much good stuff here!
Writing
I have had neither time nor energy to put pen to paper this week, other than minimal journaling and some light note-taking and list-making.
Subject: Spiritual Beings, Portals
Setting: Ship
Genre: Western
Listening
“Ghostwriter” by RJD2, from the album Deadringer. I listened to this song a lot during my first few years as a web developer, on a compilation album someone gave me back in the early 2000s. The whole album is quite good.
