These Things: Right in Front of Me

“Expectations are a bigger enemy to our happiness than our circumstances.”

- maybe Humble the Poet on Twitter

SOUNDTRACK suggestions for this edition:

• “Ambient Song #22” by Andy Othling

• “My Heart’s in the Highlands” by Arvo Part

• “Dalmak” by Esmerine

Right in Front of Me

“Or perhaps a parasol for when perambulating about town,” she inquired as I passed her door thinking at first she said, “peri-soul,” as if she could see something I need, something that should be right in front of me that I myself could not see, that experience the The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines as “pâro.” Maybe I could see it if I had a peri-soul? Surely I’m not the only one who feels pâro from time to time. This may be some part of what the poem I wrote about sitting in wet underwear gets at. I don’t think too much about the aboutness of poems though. Some people like green beans, and some do not so eat accordingly. I tend toward what Gertrude Stein said once in an interview before she went on to the next:

Look here. Being intelligible is not what it seems. You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way that you have a habit of talking, putting it in other words. But I mean by understanding enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it. And lots of people have enjoyed it, so lots of people have understood it.

Do you understand?

These too inspired recently

• Inspired? I don’t know, but I’ve updated my website and I’m getting poems and writing out there again which, as a writer, feels kind of good.

• “I think postmodernism has, to a large extent, run its course,” says David Foster Wallace in the video essay by Will Schoder, “David Foster Wallace - The Problem with Irony.”

• Which led me to wonder on the podcast, “Does Donald Trump embody the problem with, and end of, irony as David Foster Wallace wrote?”

• There’s something urgent again for me in the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

• I love this short film, “The Cosmic Dope - A Plant Experience.”