Journal – C. A. Corbell

A Meditation for Election Day

I visualize and affirm the triumph of Wisdom, of Love, of Democracy over lesser impulses and coarser currents in my country.

Journal

It’s editing season! When the words are threshed for their nutritious nuggets and the verbal husks are given back to the fields. My first full-length poetry collection is now in the professional editing phase. I should get notes back by the end of the month, if not sooner. I’m thrilled to be working with poet Christopher Luna at Printed Matter Vancouver for this process. I also just submitted a fantasy short-story to a critique group. Critters.org has been an online, purely plain-text based Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror critique group since 1995 (!) – the golden era of monospace terminals and robotically chirping dial-up […]

Journal

Two sides of the void

I have always written in journals and notebooks, but since 2011 I have been keeping separate journals of spiritual practice. A single journal might span years (dependent on its heft), so it often feels like a milestone when I reach the end of one and start a new journal. Last night I completed a journal that was begun in August 2019. In the photo it’s the thick black journal on top of the stack; the large-format gold journal is the new one, a gift my wife gave me a couple of years ago which I have saved for this. When […]

Journal

Local-Culture Power (4)

Local culture focus can:— make abundant and diverse creative arts with less energy and lower marketing, travel, and similar costs than national/global entertainment and media— establish a field of growing cultural economic activity that is not prone to disruption by automation, corporate consolidation, or AI— build more culture at “fractal scale” in similarly-unique local scenes vs. less culture via monolithic and pyramidic global-scale industry.

Journal

Time-fires

A headline in Nature today reads: “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common.” Also more common: time-fires which consume hours of your life, hours that might have been for imagination, for rest, for pleasure, for family, for community. Where do these hours go, as we hurl them into the inferno of consumerism, into the conflagration of war, onto the bonfire of shallow screen culture? What cauldron are they cooking? I wrote at Delphi that all fires are holy fires, but I do not know if these time-fires are holy when they waste the life in us, waste […]

Journal

Local-Culture Power (3)

By adopting local culture as the natural environment for creativity, we can— lessen the child-prodigy requirement for fine arts that can make a 17-year-old believe it’s “too late”— dismantle the teen-sensation (or its just-post-teen equivalent) fetish of pop arts and the corollary expiration dates for relevant work (in music, acting, etc.) – generally dispense with ageism in creative work, celebrating creative trajectories that can begin or resume at any age.

Essay - Journal

AIdolatry

I sometimes say that my religion is art, but this may do an injustice to art. Because I believe that art emerges first, before religion, in the conscious cosmos. When a being finds oneself alone with an inner life, with imagination, with the waking residue of dreams, with speculation, with euphoria, as well as with traumas, anxieties, awareness of death and of mysteries, what is the attempt to share this initially inexpressible awareness somehow with another, if not art? It is not simply communication in the mundane sense, not an attempt to coordinate or negotiate, but an attempt to commune: […]

Journal

Three dilemmas

The traveller’s dilemma: the more freely one moves, the smaller the world becomes. The saint’s dilemma: full identification with the suffering of others unveils the cruel and unjust potential of the cosmos. The meaningful dilemma: as we refine our notion of what is meaningful, meaninglessness expands.

Journal

If nothing is new, suddenly nothing is obsolete

Experimental forms, surreal constructs, aleatory processes — these are now traditional as well. Whether I write a paragraph in the format of Embeirikos or a sonnet in the format of Shakespeare, I write in an established form. This is a liberation. There is no longer any prohibition based on the arrogance and prejudices of Western modernism – if nothing is new, suddenly nothing is obsolete. What matters is human utterance in community, not novelty engineering in history.

Journal

Local-Culture Power (2)

By fostering local creative culture, we can: — enable individual creative journeys to unfold without the alienation created by global cultural juggernauts — provide fertile fields for fresh artistic movements to emerge among personally connected creators and supporters — deconstruct social barricades between establishment/outsider culture, credentialed/folk artists, and other mechanisms of exclusion and de-legitimization.

Journal - Poetics

On poetic tempo

A poem, like a song, may be given a tempo. Attention is often grabbed at readings by allegro or faster poems with rushing cataracts of juxtaposed word-images. There’s a comfortable pedestrian moderato that prevails in less feisty community readings. However some patient thoughts and experiences, like expansive music, absolutely require adagio or largo, deep breaths leaving more space around resonant words, phrases, cadences.

Journal

Local-Culture Power (1)

By focusing artistic creative work on cultivation of local culture, we can: — work within a horizon of time and community, engaging directly with meaningful development and expression — establish cultural economies that are tangible, intentional, and adaptive — dispense with artificial tension between tradition and innovation, which is created by globally-oriented academic and commercial novelty concerns

Journal

Prosaic Omphalic Vistas

I am about to pivot to a more reflective and prosaic mode on Dayword, still focused on poetry but withholding new poems of my own for awhile. The happy news is that I’m returning to Athens, where among experiences to come I will be working on a poetry collection. The process demands some withholding, to let the work become itself without arbitrary exhibitionism. If you’re in Athens in the next two months and happen to have a bottle of wine, you can hear some. Speaking of arbitrary exhibitionism, and while we’re navel gazing, I confess this is my greatest disappointment […]

Journal - Poetry

Easter Shade

Our children run to find their eggs with hungry hands and hopping legs while half a world away they starve upon the carcass missiles carve. What conquered death and rose again? A gentle victory over sin? Or slavish naves and gilded grails and empire’s crosses, hammers, nails?

Journal - Poetry

Exceeds Expectations

I am coming to understand your expectations. You expect me, finally, to be something other than idea, something not imaginary. You expect me to be a particular fleshy body. You expect me to affirm the demographics of my concrete data. You expect me to be a flow in a network of biology. You expect me to be a node in a graph of history. You expect me to be an ego received from the form of the the mask you have hung on my face. You expect me to have a seat at the game table, to choose a side, […]

Journal - Poetry

Livelihood

I look up from the square display, frustrated with the problem of tangled information, its lossiness. Outside: weathered stone, eye-shaped leaves green, sun-drunk, serpent tongues, genital nerves, rhizomes, tendrils, fractal worlds. I rub my eyes, return; tap tap tapping monospace code, the one thing on earth I get paid for.

Journal - Poetry - Satire

A little air

There is nothing so remarkably expansive as human vanity. They even use it to inflate balloons.

Journal - Poetry

A Pleasure

A pleasure is not a shallow pastel, a cartoon angel, a giddy bubble. A pleasure has teeth, time and shadow. Oceans are tugged back by the moon’s leash. I feel the salt in my blood. I taste her tongue. The storm waves hurl breathtaking spray up through stone fists. Limbs and bones fall into place, earth’s embrace thick mineral space where only life escapes unless it burrows, deeper seeking treasure, seeking home. The split husk, the swelling germ — death and life tumble, screw up the sheets of earth’s bed in vegetal coitus and Thou art That, leaf-rot and lipstick, […]

Journal - Poetry

Gymnos Antaios

My body horizontal, face down I push against the earth. I push against the rock-skinned molten core, spinning space-top magnet. I push against the mother sphere, the curved blue breast and the warped hand of physics that holds me here. In the body’s cosmos cells collapse like osmotic galaxies, strands of creature strengthen, stretched on bone scaffolding. When I stand again, I am stronger. I arise with my breast full of blood and stone flesh flexes, animal power spun from gyred earth. But what greater strength might I know, what titan become, if instead of a push I endeavored with […]

Journal - Poetry

I asked the tangle

I asked the tangle: can you spare a thread? And the tangle’s fibrous mouth formed a hole, and said: you have some nerve, some artery, some hair, some twisted DNA, and endless strands of narrative. What more do you imagine I can give you? Maybe you should talk to the untangling.

Journal - Poetry

The wrong candle

This candle must have come from petroleum, stolen black stash of Hades, not wax of Kore’s bees. A philosopher wrote that a proper tragedy must begin with an offense, an unpunished crime which informs the nostrils of Furies. Sooted wick, smoke untrimmed and teach the alarm. A little blur of heat and light hovers above the yellow glow. This candle was once plant-flesh soaked in archaic sun-gold, fallen in the layers of millennia, squeezed by earth’s press to fill the cisterns of the underworld. Some choice bits of death Hades gives back each year to nourish new life in her […]

Journal - Poetry

Belly full of ink

I have a belly full of ink — penultimate nausea. I swallowed something through my eyes, I think. The tensions between constellations arrayed my retinas’ red antennas with star starts. Now they are lumps in my core, bloated black holes trying to swallow indigestible quasars. My body does not disagree with the cosmos. Everything that disagrees with everything in space-time, in eternity, in our busy rumbling bubble of human vanity swirls and sinks here in my gut, fighting it out.

Journal - Poetry

Pythagorean Hymn

Sphere and cylinder, skeleton formulas of thought, yet walk on shrieking chalk heels these neural corridors, float and grin ghostlike through dusty synaptic nodes. The god of mathematics laughs at his supposed disproof. Pythagoras is stretched like Prometheus, the hypotenuse drawn out, bisected by the future pencil. For him I will sacrifice the first of the looseleaf flock, ring the bell theory and construct the imaginary field from the real.

Journal - Poetry

Complaints of the righteous

The skies opened and complaints of the righteous rained down, a flood of soggy corrections clogging the gutters, jamming the wires. Their effect on the ecosystem is the subject of competing claims. But this much is certain: a sky full of grumbling is better, forever, than a sky full of bombs.

Journal - Poetry

Poetry Game Instructions

When the round begins place the token on your tongue. Try to pronounce a flower. Try to pronounce a city. Drop the dice in the river. Spin the thousand-year spinner. Draw a card from the deck of a ship. If the card is a club eat a bruised fruit. If the card is a diamond add a drop of blood to the soil. If the card is a heart draw again. When you land on a space start the timer. After the token has dissolved hand your tongue to the next player.

Journal - Poetry

Training memes

Prior to these glowing screens were billboards, placards, sandwich boards, curated store windows that said many of the same things: notice me, be enticed by me, think like me, buy me. Those flat relics hang around still with their chipped paint, single-message slow memes fixed to the landscape, ignored by heads-down hand-held eyes, left like those rusty training wheels in the garage for the child’s bike we once wrecked in the gravel, crying with a pet wound. Now we have so many fast reflective wheels whirring, well-heeled adult spokes spinning out millions of powerful, expansive ways to crash, so many […]

Journal - Poetry - Review (Live Event)

Brave Little Venue, No. 1: Atlantis Lounge

The red velvet curtain is drawn to hide the street windows and stained glass signage behind the stage. In the center of the ceiling, in the shadows, a mirror ball spins slowly, just in case. A skeleton piano bares its felt and metal bones. A Klimt print nude floats in a spray of flowers. Arrivals show their connections through gestures: wave and embrace, shoulder-touch and fist-bump, impromptu conferences of old acquaintances, table seating shuffles, oz-troupes skipping toward the lounge. Beers and cocktails multiply; pizzas levitate above the tables. The first band begins. “It’s tater diggin’ time” Taylor’s cello sounds round, like a big bass […]

Journal

A tale of two carrots

I offer a brief observation on a long-running debate: “carrot on a stick” and “the carrot or the stick” are two different metaphors, with two very different meanings. Mostly I have encountered folks who use “the carrot or the stick” denying that the other phrase makes any sense, and claiming that it’s a mistake. This only proves that they don’t understand it. “The carrot or the stick,” as is widely observed, is a simple metaphor for reward vs. punishment. It is useful for those who want to talk about situations where either reward or punishment can be offered as strategic […]

Journal - Poetry

Grandmother Corntassel

Grandmother Corntassel from the rolling Cherokee woods had known seventeen summers when she married John Bradley, grandson of an immigrant from Yorkshire to Virginia. When I was young I thought all ancestors lost,* shadows on a dusty cart-path that decades effaced and centuries built over. But are they not here, encircling uslike we are the spirits they summoned, and is this not their dust on our soles? Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil, our fresh eyes on the old stars, our fresh fears in the anxious human-harassed world where they fucked and sang their way through things […]

Journal - Nature - Poetry

The mountain watched us

We returned to the thrice-burned wood, shoulder of Klickitat once dense green, now spiked with ghost trees. Close to downed trunks ash white and charred black we turned soil, pulled grass, and set in live starts of oceanspray / ironwood and wooly sunflower. Around the new plantings we built flimsy graze-guards of slender limbs, snapped from the desiccated bodies. The October sun was strong and gold. The earth in our fingers was soft and dark. A raven flew over and shared its deep, purred croak. Young firs waited, waist-high, green, patient in grassy fields pierced by their forebearers’ wooden bones. […]

Journal

Walt keeps singing

In my dream I’m walking with my love S. and we meet in Leo D. in the street. It is night, in Portland; he informs us of an event. It isn’t exactly a production, but all manner of artists and actors are there. He leads us toward a warehouse building; through a momentarily open door I can see Alex R. reclined, but attentive, in an armchair. The closed door that we reach has a square translucent window, slightly amber-orange with almost-a-letter formed from strips of tape – perhaps an H, or a T. Leo opens and we enter, and the […]

Journal

On song exchange

I have incomplete and evolving knowledge about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, so I am writing this post more to express my interest and ask questions, than to claim any expertise. From diverse sources I have encountered mention of song exchanges by Chinookan and other indigenous groups of the region. I have not learned the details of the process, or how they might have differed among different tribes or villages, but the general idea seems to be that songs are revered and not generally shared without permission, but they can be exchanged. If you know a song from […]

Journal

The only song

The surface of the world hums and throbs with songs. A stoned neighbor’s 70’s-radio playlist. A restaurant kitchen’s thrashy closing jams. A mother’s lullaby and a father’s lullaby. An opera singer’s audition. Dungeon industrial tracks. The call to prayer. The tipsy empire of karaoke. A nervous adolescent’s talent-show premiere. A crackling crooner from a digitized 78, uploaded. A paved-urban-playground song. A smores-smudged camp sing-along. A sneering, snappy set opener at the club. A busker’s folksified pop cover. Ecstatic humming and wailing in a village ritual. The junior college musical production. Dharma-chanting in the zendo. Ironic anti-songs at the new music […]

Journal

Learning my first rembetika

ΌΣΟ ΜΕ ΜΑΛΏΝΕΙΣ is the song — my first rembetika to learn instrumentally on guitar. The part I’m working on is normally on bouzouki (and other instruments, e.g. accordion and violin). I will learn at least a dozen of these bouzouki melodies on guitar, perhaps many more, by next spring, when I’ll be in Athens and plan to buy a bouzouki of my own. I have read the part from sheet music, but the recording is the real guide. Rembetika is like jazz or bluegrass in this sense — the melodies transcribed in books rarely tell the whole story. Often […]

Journal

The boy with no ancestors

A boy thought of Ancestors. He thought of an old village he had never seen, a language he had never heard. He thought of fires and hunts and births and gods. He thought of what home would have meant. A boy thought, “I have no Ancestors.” A boy thought, “I have television and plastic toys and shopping centers. I have songs on the radio that are dumb, played over and over, songs I don’t want to hear, songs made by nobody I know. I have a broken family. I have a mother at war with a father. I have parents […]

Journal

What AI can’t replace

AI can’t replace people in a room together reading poetry. AI can’t replace people gathered in a café making music. AI can’t replace the artist’s open studio where you see the mess as well as the work. AI can’t replace the show a local producer puts together with local aerialists and dancers. AI can’t replace the conversation at the pub. AI can’t replace the hours of solitude or the hours of social observation that led to your exquisite short story. AI can’t replace the meal improvised from what’s coming up in the garden. AI can’t replace the flirtation, the encouragement, […]

Journal

Our rich soil

Dead things fall into a million mouths, delicious material to tear apart and recycle, a heap of latent treasures for future shoots, flowers, boughs and antlers. I look at the remnants of art that have fallen, becoming our rich soil, these beautifully disintegrating attempts, brittle soul-leaves dropped from the skeletal limbs of decayed royalty, obsolete aristocracy. Nothing is lost here. The old gods, the great works, the dead dilettantes – their molecules are in your mouth.

Journal - Satire

Announcing McTribute

(Portland, Oregon) A new restaurant project is promising to bring back the gangbuster Portland culinary scene, by going where the local, creative farm-to-table has feared to tread: the comfortable familiarity of the global commercial food industry. A goal of the nascent effort is to bring economic relief to chefs who have lost businesses to the one-two punch of pre-pandemic real estate frenzy and pandemic shutdowns. Setting aside the experimental devolution of Portland’s indie past, the new restaurant will give chefs a nightly opportunity to “cover” successful dishes from America’s most popular restaurants including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, and Applebees. There […]

Journal

Silent movies on the moon

Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk. Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears. These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect. If we […]

Journal

Dusk-dreaming

The equinox sunrise glows gray behind the curtain. A bird’s shadow flies, close by. I know there will be equal hours of dark and light outside. This will change quickly; parity is not equilibrium. The shadow will spread more, across each day. Here’s a trick our ancestors knew in their smoky villages: in the winter, make things. Fill the cooling evenings with something you can create with your hands, with your voice, with your dusk-dreaming.