Humanyms

News and Views

An oak asserts its place

as Canadian as any maple.

The sky

was extraordinary the other day.

Ottawa Poetry: The Tree reading tonight will be at 8 pm with Lisa Robertson and Monty Reid but from 6:45-7:45 I’ll be giving a workshop on poetry (what people bring to share and a focus on line breaks). The next workshop will be in 2 weeks will be the first of a 4 session cycle with Sandra Ridley. Facilitators will rotate over the year so that the catalyst will keep changing.

Other Blogs: Perhaps that notice should go over at pesbo. [done.] I try to stream things…the Bywords issue launch and mullings over the functions of punctuation and the line in poetry are over at pesbo. 40 Words is its own thing (now stable at every second day). That wouldn’t make sense to merge back over here. Eaten Up is doing fine on its own and better readership or eye-ership than all of the rest combined.

The function left for Humanyms tends to be more of a parlour. Although, it being most read by people I actually know, it is the best place for broadcast of anything I want to tell quickly. It’s a channel I want to keep open with small things.

Other Places: A constant enduring format is structurally reassuring. Like Presurfer. There Gerald recently passed along the concept of baragami, the artful arrangement of slices of toast. It’s nice to know. My life is not more complete to know it but my day gets an upward bump. It’s like observing a flower arrangement, or attending to a breath, or really seeing the pattern in tomato seeds. It’s an overlooked small way to live and inject beauty unnecessarily, impractically. It’s being softer than one has to be. Taking more care than one needs to.

Other Times: One wants to control or give up but as Sri Chinmoy said, “Peace begins when expectation ends.” Or as Deni Bonet sings (#11 on her sidebar), “I probably should give it up and stay in bed today, but I say, Fuck It.”

Quote: “Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyway.” – Steven Coallier