Posted on: April 29, 2009
Simultaneous Contrasts, Sun and Moon, by Robert Delauney. 1913
Having just finished another Bart Ehrman book, Jesus, Interrupted, I can’t help but ponder the human need to remain in the distant past. The human need to remake that past to fit the present. Square pegs and all of that. The round hole of now. The miserably archaic square peg of then. This need is both puzzling and understandable, given how difficult and complex life is in the present, in our modern world. Understandable, in that because of those difficulties and complexities, people want to hold on to (their perception of) simpler times, more basic constructions and instructions, a binary system or two or three. Puzzling because of the incommensurability of that simpler time and those binary systems with today’s multiplicities. Yes, ancient ways can…
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Posted on: April 27, 2009
The Sower, by Vincent Van Gogh. 1888
Sometimes, poetry is like a mystery, like a detective story put to song. Sometimes similes and metaphors string bits of life (like notes) into a song, a symphony, or a collage of chords never heard together. The point. Yes, that’s often the point. The bridge works for visuals as well. And for tactiles. The bridges work between humans, between nature, between humans and nature and beyond. Inside, outside, vertically, horizontally, depth and foreground, finding all dimensions, incorporating disparate elements. Harmonizing. Even atonally. Even off key to form new strings of keys washing into larger lakes, rivers, oceans of meaning.
The poet Jill Magi works some metaphorical magic on a seemingly unlikely topic below: Labor. To borrow a phrase, it’s a labor of love going back in time and…
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Posted on: April 26, 2009
LABOR
by Jill Magi
Last fall I found myself at the gate of an archive. Remembering something from my labor and union past and thinking about my work life at present, I came across the on-line finding guides for the Wagner Labor Archive at New York University. The writings here are a warm-up to my trip into that archive. As of this spring, I’ve been inside, but that writing — is it poetry? — is slow to come along. For now, I’m using exposition to trace the outline of a shape I do not yet know.
November 4, 2008
On the day of an historical election, after weeks of hearing…
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