Share the Wealth with Linsey Stevens: Iphelia and Editing with the Gift of Feeling
What kind of work would you wake up in a hospital bed eager to do? And how is editing like being a doula? The first question is one I answered back in the fall of…
Category: Writing
Not a River-Like Novel; But a Novel Like Poetry, or Rather, a Narrative Poem, an Epos in Mosaic, a Kind of Arabesque Preoccupation
Over the weekend Lindsey asked me some questions about my writing process (such as, How long did it take you to write Book of Mev? Did you always know what the structure would be? How did…
Gratitude for Demun Share the Wealth Writing Class
As the summer Share the Wealth Writing Class on Demun winds down, gratitude is, once again, an appropriate theme for meditation (quotations with page number are from Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works!). “A French proverb…
That Glow, That Yes!
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft 30 September 2000 It’s clear to me today, anyway, that my Holy Contour of Life book will be a structure like Natalie’s: short, compressed, easy…
Something I Had in Common with Philip Roth
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
Something I Had in Common with Philip Roth
As I sat there and watched him struggle to go on living, I tried to focus on what the tumor had done with him already. This wasn’t difficult, given that he looked on that stretcher…
A Sangha with Tu Fu, Milarepa, Lady Murasaki, Li Ching-chao, Basho, and Jack Kerouac
Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, editors, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School Rereading this collection after many years, I’m struck by the following perspectives from various writers I noted then and that still…
Three Questions
Gregg Krech, Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection (Stone Bridge Press, 2001) I learned of Naikan through consulting the bibliography of Patricia Ryan Madson’s book, Improv Wisdom. Therein, she cited books on…
Like Staying up All Night with Your Best Friend
Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball There are many influences that went into my creating Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, and Allen Ginsberg was a major one. Here…
To Contend, To Enliven, To Distance, To Advocate, To Investigate, To Rally, To Prioritize, To Surprise
I’ve read Anne Waldman since 2001 (Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays got me started). Her epics, poems, interviews, and edited anthologies (from the Kerouac School at Naropa) stimulate and open up possibilities. One of…