酷我-北美枫

Thanks for your discerning eye.

Listen to John Cage's 4'33'' and his view of the music of silence.

John Cage’s 4'33'' --
the music flows
in silence
through the chambers of the heart

i HEAR Calliope Humming?! co-authored with ericcoliu

Dedicated to Rodney L. Eisenbrand whose rodryu constantly surprise me and whose latest rodryu entitled Rodryu stirs my emotions and imagination

Notes:

1 As a form of poetry, rodryu is Eisenbrand-esque senryu. One of Rodney L. Eisenbrand’s personal quotes is as follows: I can't always follow the rules so sometimes I break, umm.

2 Below are the poem text of Rodnyu by Rodney L. Eisenbrand and an excerpt from his reply to the comments on his poem:

Poem Text of Rodnyu

To be born with size
not having to wish other
wise and need extends.

An Excerpt from His Reply:

“Thanks everyone for the read and kind words, this is the only thing I have written in awhile, I need to draw in my thoughts they seem to have scattered lately, I cannot gather together anything coherent enough that I’m able to put it on paper.“ (emphasis mine)

3 Thinking of Li Bai While Waiting for Calliope is presequel to i HEAR Calliope Humming?!:

You promised
you would come to see me.
Through the lonely night,
I waited beneath the blossoms,
wondering if they kept their beauty
even when it was dark.

Raising my cup,
I enticed the moon,
for her, with my shadow
would make a party of three –
the moon knew
you were away from me.

Having never waited,
a woman like you
could hardly know
how long a night can be.

P.S. Any opinions, comments and especially critiques on i HEAR Calliope Humming?! would be much appreciated!

Today, Toronto marks 175th birthday.

Live with Toronto (in summer)

Toronto is thick with dreams. The streets are layered with stories, dense with emotions and desires. The display windows are covered with fantasies, replete with imagination and frustration. Above the skyscrapers are clouded with PC talks hanging there like smog.

Thanks for your generous comments.

The Winter of My Discontent has been published in the March Issue of Word Catalyst

Below is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ interview with Nikki Giovanni:

BILL MOYERS: What do words do for grief? The sadness you sometimes feel, the grief you felt after Virginia Tech's massacre. What do they do?

NIKKI GIOVANNI: I guess they let us know that we're not alone. I think what words do is we acknowledge that we're human and we hurt. And so you don't have to pretend you're not hurting. Because you have a hole in your heart. Poems, I mean, go back to 9-11-01 here in the States. People were posting poems all over the internet, because they were trying to find a way to connect. To say, "This hurts, but we're not alone. Someone else is sharing this pain." And this thing that happened at Virginia Tech, it was an incredibly sad time for us. And I think that the only thing that I could do to make sense out of it was to connect these dots. And the only thing to connect the dots was going to be love. Because, no matter what else is wrong with you, good wine and good s e x will make you feel better. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that.

BILL MOYERS: You are, you most certainly are.

NIKKI GIOVANNI: Yeah. But, you know, 65 year-old women are not finished. It was great. And I just thought, you know, I've got to rethink it, and then I've got to find an object.

BILL MOYERS: But the object you chose was bicycles. Why bicycles? And what do they have to do with tragedy and drama and loss and death even?

NIKKI GIOVANNI: Well, tragedy and trauma are wheels. And they're always with us, aren't they? They're always spinning around. That's the perimeters of life, of these tragedies. They just spin around and spin around. And so what you're trying to do is bring them together. And when you bring them together you've got the bar, right? So you have a vehicle, right? Well, when I grew up, you learned to ride a bicycle by getting on a bicycle. Which means you're going to fall off. And love and life and bicycles are about trust and balance. It's about riding it and believing that this thing that doesn't make sense for you to be on, can move. And we see it here. This is such a great city, I love Manhattan. And I miss it in my dreams sometimes. But when we see the messengers on that bike, that's just trust and balance. They just say, "I'm coming at it. I don't care if the cars are going to swerve, I'm-" It's beautiful watching them on their bicycles. But we do that in our relationships. It's the same bike. We are continuing relationships through trust and balance.