Sunday, February 23, 2014


I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself. 



"The Bagel" by David Ignatow from 
Against the Evidence.
© Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

Monday, February 10, 2014

“Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds,” John Updike wrote, a decade ago. “The power of materialist science to explain everything—from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms, and their sub-microscopic components—seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires, and—may we even say—illusions composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address, organize, and placate these. I believe, then, that religious faith will continue to be an essential part of being human, as it has been for me.”

Quoted by Adam Gopnik in his New Yorker article, "Bigger than Phil:  When did faith begin to fade?" February 2014

Onomatomania
by Thomas Lux
  
the word for the inability to find the right word,
leads me to self-diagnose: onomatomaniac. It's not
the 20 volume OED, I need,
nor Dr. Roget's book, which offers
equals only, never discovery.
I accept the fallibility of language,
its spastic elasticity,
its jake-leg, as well as prima ballerina, dances.
I accept that language
can be manipulated towards deceit
(ex.: The Mahatmapropaganda, i.e., Goebbels);
I accept, and mourn, though not a lot,
the loss of the dash/semi-colon pair.
It's the sound of a pause unlike no other pause.
And when the words are tedious
and tedious also their order--sew me up
in a rug and toss me in the sea!
Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry
is a corpse colder than the Ice Man,
they've all been dying for thousands of years,
yet people still write, people still read,
and everyone knows that nothing is really real
until it is written.
Until it is written!
Even those who cannot read
know that.
Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Lux. "I was annoyed by one of the 
occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion." 

from Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets, 2-7-2014