bi_janus
-
Posts
353 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Posts posted by bi_janus
-
-
I commend to you Steven Pinker's recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature in which he makes the case that we have, as societies, particularly in the West, become less violent since the rise of nation-states. Unfortunately, a statistical view of the prevalence of violence doesn't make each instance less a horror. Sometimes, our better angels require assistance and we must stop the nonsense where we are able, by word, by deed, or by both.
-
Much is implied in the space of that held breath before the answer we all hope we would have.
-
Just finished 28. The story got better and better with each chapter. Very nice read, Colin.
-
Finished it last night, way past my bedtime. Irritatingly engrossing--a fine, well-written story and, as the Pecman suggested, a bargain. Ann had bunny slippers years ago, but they never affected me that way.
-
The link below is to a piece in this Sunday's NYT about a group of women who undertake risks that most don't have to undertake to write poetry, in this case traditional Afghan poetry. I suppose, like all people, they express themselves, sometimes at great risk, because something in them insists on expression.
-
Camy,
I read this today during the lunch break at a training I was conducting for firefighters and cops. Not one dissonant note disturbed the poem's deep affect on me. Like Cole's experience I was transported to times in my youth when I had similar experiences, and like all fine poems, this verse clarified those memories and their associated feelings. When I trudged home an hour ago, I shared the poem with Ann, who smiled as she read and then said, "He must have been in the same room with us when we first knew each other," such was the evocation for her. Thanks so much for sharing this.
I have a small group of poems that I keep handy to read occasionally. This one is going in the file. Sometimes I read a verse and smile so much that I think, "I wish I would have written that."
-
This is a rather sweet story in this morning's The Sunday Oregonian. I remember teachers we all knew were gay in the sixties and seventies. The decade of the sixties was the last of the era of the Johns Committee and its awful work (the second URL describes its work). I knew I had moved to the South.
-
Thanks, Mike. Two steps forward, one step back is still progress, but the backward steps sure are painful.
He who allows oppression shares the crime.
--Desiderius Erasmus
-
I took the comment just the way you intended, Cole. Thanks. I think I was reading too much Eliot when I wrote this; it has the faint odor of too much effort.
-
Cole,
My mother, the sober one of the two parents, was a nominal Roman Catholic. For a time, when I was nine and ten, I was fascinated by church ritual, including last rites, so I learned the word unction. Fortunately, I fell in among Buddhists at age nine! My mother, in infinite wisdom, ditched my father when I was eight; the poem looked back from the age of fifteen at trips to the bar with my father when I was six and seven. My father swore me to secrecy about the visits to the bar, and I kept the secret until well after the divorce. Secrets are often an important part of the lives of children with alcoholic parents or parent.
Rich
-
This one I wrote when I was fifteen. I suppose it's typical of poetry written by children of alcoholic parents. Each year, about this time, I rework the last five lines, which are the only lines of the poem that have evolved. If you need happy verse, this one won't help.
The Idea of Usefulness at Snyder’s Bar (1965)
Bi Janus
No warmth on my palm
sliding over the wood table,
where sawdust is the unction
for a child’s confusion.
At the right hand of a beer
John Joseph sits in conversation
at the bar with an archangel
who keeps his glass full.
The pucks slide without
the friction of our hands held
tight when walking with Dad
to the tavern for quality time.
The silence of that progress,
his guilt heart-locked and leaden,
fashions my rough desire
to find my use in his life.
Would I be useful if flesh
were stripped from me
in a sky burial
and my thighbones
were wrought flutes?
-
Maybe I had half a stroke.
-
Thanks, Mike. Prairie Home got nothing on y'all. I've attended a lot of fires, many involving ethanol, but none involving bananas.
-
Camy,
At least you got the machine. I gave up after the "the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service" message. You little anarchist, you!
-
I always took delight in the fact that the good Professor Henry, who was a bit of a provocateur, published an article on homophobia in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
-
Here's an interesting bit of research on the roots of homophobia conducted at one of the many fine institutions that I attended in a galaxy far, far away. Just read the abstract if the thought of penile plethysmography makes you queasy (although I suspect that Des evaluates volume changes without relying on laboratory instruments).
-
I guess you can't say gay at BYU, so SGA is the more palatable alternative.
Some of the individual videos in the series are heartwarming.
-
I use MS Office mainly because I'm lazy and Microsoft is the standard in my work environment. Most word processing programs will allow me to save documents in a variety of file formats, and most documents I circulate go out in PDF anyway. But, there are always minor formatting issues that don't translate well. Now, the other MS Office components are irritating in varying degrees (the ubiquity of PowerPoint is a catastrophe), and Access is just lamentable. Since I use Macs at home, Filemaker Pro is my DB program of choice, and I wish I could get our IT department to use it. Alas, I am stuck, flailing in the MS spider's web.
I will never forgive Gates for almost driving WordPerfect (before Corel got a hold of it) from the marketplace.
-
Thanks for this, Camy.
A nice description of the source of his poetry from the Poetry Archive:
"My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated, and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp."
Philip Larkin, who turned down the Laureate gig and was the subject of a Motion biography famously said he was likable, but not tough enough in his writing. I'm not sure that was an accurate description.
-
Easter, 2012
Bi Janus
Passing Eliot’s cruel month
and returning to the Passion
once kept safe to me as history,
I am falling past argument
toward beatitudes.
That the tomb is empty
is no great surprise,
nor that the women
found the emptiness.
They have tombs in them.
This story, absorbed
by my bones in youth
leafs out in guncotton boles,
but its root is in a soil
I cannot penetrate.
I am falling encircled
by the serpent,
tail in mouth, wheeling
around the fleshy axle,
the root older than memory.
Once out of nothing come,
born anew, leaving us
origin in emptiness as story,
who will control the violence?
Better we know the sacred as tomb.
-
I thought a long time before posting this comment, realizing that my words may seem insensitive.
The tragedy of this killing is beyond discussion. That a vigilante was armed and misused a weapon is undoubted and reprehensible.
That said, I'm one of those guys who walk around armed much of the time. I do so where I am allowed by law to do so. Do I feel safer when I am armed? I do not particularly because I don't generally feel unsafe. Do I have anxiety attacks when I do not carry a weapon? No. In an early post on this topic, I believe Des spoke to his having been a victim of violence. People who have been shot at or attacked with blades often develop an altered point of view about firearms, especially if they survived the attack but loved ones or bystanders did not.
I am exceptionally well-trained in the use of firearms and am clearly aware of the circumstances in which I might use one against another person. None of those circumstances involves protection of property. I might even be willing to give my life before I would shoot someone, but I would have no hesitation about stopping an attack on my wife or my son by shooting if there was no other way. I have been shot at on more than one occasion, and in all but one instance have had the option of retreating, which I took.
Ann often hikes alone in the wilderness near our home, and when she does, she is armed not because she expects to be attacked, but because we both know that an attack is a possibility. I hope that if she is attacked she will do whatever she has to in order to come back from the trip. For me the handgun is a tool, a very imperfect one at that, but on very rare occasions, it is the only tool that will suffice. The taking of any life ought to mark the person who has acted to do so forever, and in fact it does. I have great difficulty forming a philosophical system around this issue that matches my experience, so I have given up trying. I haven't been sad for one moment, though, that I always came home to my family at the end of the day.
-
Thanks to Des and Ben for a generous story. Oldie I can buy, but golden? Well I suppose he does resemble Adonis ever so slightly.
-
Well, let's try it again. A word changes everything.
The Promise
Bi Janus
Saturday morning
I came upon a promise
standing upon my door,
not even the tips
of bony fingers
soft or raw,
the frame
skeletal without
decay but all waiting.
Instead,
pointing to what
I will see later—
green in Summer.
The promise
that if I can abide
fire will greet
me in the Fall.
-
The Promise
Bi Janus
Saturday morning
I came upon a promise
standing upon my door,
not even the tips
of bony fingers
soft or raw,
the frame
skeletal without
decay but all waiting.
Instead,
pointing to what
I will see in later—
green in Summer.
The promise
that if I can abide
fire will greet
me in the Fall.
Scan to donate
Shard
in Poets' Corner
Posted
Shard
Bi Janus
The verse is a shard,
found in situ
in a certain layer.
I brush the dirt away
with camel hair of vocal cords,
slowly sounding its contours.
If I speak other shards,
I may piece a pot together
and hold it up before me.
I cannot know
if the potter was a saint
or a murderous heart.