october issue of brink

brink has published three of my poems--click here--dedicated to loren eiseley, sergei esenin, and a five-foot statue of liberty, respectively.

i also loved the li he, translated from the chinese with calligraphy--click here.

Flights and Bounds

the unbearable lightness of accusation

milan kundera, sometime communist hardliner and eventual self-exiled freedom wrighter, was recently discovered to have been an informant for the czech totalitarian state in the 1950s. the accusation, which kundera denies and claims amounts to 'the assassination of an author,' came about accidentally in a deep excavation into the archives of the czech state under communist rule.

it's a shame that kundera's gut reaction betrays the profound lessons of his work--to examine rather than deny existence in the body, with all the political pressures, personal failures, protean patterns, and cetera. the moral dilemma for kundera is not resolvable.

he's probably guilty. anyway, the idea that an artist's character compromises his art--that is, that a bad man can't be great writer--is an old cliche. immortality is still one of my favorite novels...

journal entry

the first cool days of autumn. glove season. masha is swimming (indoors) again after a long year. i arranged to have my photography and painting exhibited at a liquor store in brookline through november. i am translating the poems of marina tsvetaeva for a selected poems, to be published by a small university press. it feels like i lose a contest every day. news from albuquerque--a hot-air balloon got tangled in the power lines, the passengers spilled out of the gondola, and someone died. any day, new poems coming out in several places--i'm working on footnotes, explication, dedications and acknowledgements to post here.
jackson can roll and grasp and coo and spit. i'm teaching him to cuss in the only two languages i can. he's four months old and 13 lbs. an avocado is turning black on the kitchen table for him.
i put the new new yorker on the back of the toilet.

coyotes in boston

i ride my bike the ten miles home two nights a week, through cambridge, boston, and points-in-between. the last leg is arbor way, twisting through the harvard-tended arnold arboretum. last night, at 2:30a, i saw two coyotes cross the road behind me.
there were signs up at the entrance last fall to watch out for coyotes, but masha didn't believe...