Yusuf al-Saigh (1933-2006) was an Iraqi poet who has published poetry since the 1950s. He also worked as an illustrator and painter. I read a short verse that nicely renders the working of symbolic authority: Between the Sultan and His Statue A wily sculptor Cut several pounds off the sultan’s figure And added several pounds …
How do we meditate on the idea of truth? Philosophers have written about it for many centuries. We will not revisit the theories of Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Kant, Frege, Derrida. We don’t need to remember anything if we think for ourselves. Take a long breath. Truth is a property of statements, not of things. We …
Kattya Janssen (b. ?) is a Dutch poet and artist. I read a poem from the section ‘Lust’ on her website: Dark bodies touching clear sky Underneath crisp pearly grass Feverish shadows Oakwood touching hands Capricious patterns of roughness The sliding of a foot Fanciful flowers crushing Aurora shows up The cold whim of the …
First we breathe in and feel blessed. What inspired our meditation about reality must have been our involvement with it, in some way. There are people who think that what we call reality is ‘in reality’ a fiction. The universe is empty space laced with energy and some of this energy takes on a special …
So I have come to an inversion: your recognition will feel like an insult, (This is a defense mechanism) I have accomplished officially accomplished close to nothing, and I am still closing in to nothingness. This morning (but the diction is universal) I realized that all future things will be mere projections of the past, …
May Sarton (1912-1995) was a very prolific writer of novels, journals and poetry. She kept reinventing herself and wrote until she was very old. According to literary critics, she is an important contemporary American author. This time, I found a poem she wrote about happiness: The work of happiness I thought of happiness, how it …
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957) is a American poet born to Chinese exiles. His father, who plays an important role in his poetry, was the personal physician to Mao Zedong. His poetry has been compared to John Keats, Rilke and Roethke and he was influenced by old Chinese poems like Tu Fu, which shows in his economic use …
Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) was an American poet who said that a poem is a ‘thing that wounds’. Her poetry looks and sounds original, but she was influenced by Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Currying the Fallow-Colored Horse And to the curious I say, Don’t be naïve. The soul, like a trinket, is a she. I …
From September 2017 until May 2018 the number of views per month increased exponentially. I posted every day: essays, poems, reviews, aphorisms, jokes, short stories, meditations. Yes, I am living the dream. I really do writing every single sentence. But this month my stats look like I’m not going to surpass last month. I am …
Rae Armantrout (b. 1947) is one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets (language poetry: started in the 1970s; language dictates meaning; reader participates in constructing meaning) . Her poetry is characterized by the clashes of the elements they are composed of. She has said that she is seeking to …
J.D. McClatchy (1945 – 2018) was a prolific poet, editor, critic and librettist from Pennsylvania. He was praised for his polished and erudite verse. Lines on my face Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma …
Alice Oswald (b. 1966) is an Oxford-educated classicist and award-winning poet. She has written poetically about ecology and wrote her own take on the Iliad. Her 2016 book is called “Falling Awake”. I read the 1996 poem “Wedding”: Wedding From time to time our love is like a sail and when the sail begins to alternate from tack to …
The Refugee Convention entered into force on 22 April 1954. In the above text, we look at the word particularly. We note that it does not mean exclusively. Even if the head of the family (which we should consider an outdated term, but can still understand) has not fulfilled the necessary conditions for admission to a particular country, the Convention …
This is the first of some short book reviews here on creativechoice. I love reading and will share my thoughts about the books that I are think are worth my readers’ while. The short book Capitalism: A Short History begins with a concise discussion of the most important figures in the history of the concept …
