Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
The Claudius App
Jeff Nagy and Eric Linsker released today the first issue of the their web magazine, The Claudius App, coinciding with the visit of Kate Middleton to Canada and the Royal Wedding in Monaco, and the collapse of the case against DSK. Coincidence? It’s hard to say, for The Claudius App is billed as the home of a new movement, or moment, as movements are always moments writ large – Fast Poetry. When I first heard the term, I thought at last some young poets were picking up on Hannah Weiner’s iconic work The Fast: a new poetry of spiritual quest and cleansing, purging the toxic poetics that surround us in North America. (And maybe they have.) But I slowly came to what sense I still have command over: this was fast in the sense of rapid or quick, in the sense of not slow, or possibly in the sense of dissipated, unreliable, loose, without scruples; entirely unrelated to Yom Kippur and penitence.