Category: poetic

Categories
poetic

This is how he grows

The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

http://www.cdra.org.za/creativity/Rainer%20Maria%20Rilke%20-%20The%20Man%20Watching.htm

Categories
olympia personal poetic

It’s Oly Time

Miles and miles beneath the wheels,
we made it back under a shining sun,
mostly – but buffeted by biting winds –
it didn’t even snow on us ’til Washington.

And now home.
Like an ointment I wait for it to sink in,
to fill the vacancies and mend the lacerations,
to calm and to nourish and to fill –
I’ll overflow with everything that’s been lacking –
I’ll merge my Dionysus with my Apollo
and find peace in my passion and
slumber in my wine.

As I sleep, dreams of assignments overdue,
assignments I’ve already done,
assignments who may only haunt me through ghosts.
I’ve overcome them all.

Home.
I’ll never ride out, now,
without knowing when and how I’ll return.

Categories
personal poetic

A Suit and a Haircut

Yesterday I bought a suit and a haircut,
and now I’ve got the world on a string.
At least until the string’s cut,
then it won’t mean a thing.

Interviews, moving, assignments,
fond farewells and
fond hellos
and
the

d
i
s
t
a
n
c
e

that beckons like a drum,
that thrums through the wires;
the distance between home and home.

It was never a choice,
but it was always hard not choosing.

Categories
personal poetic

a poem, but not for me

apple trees, winter

silence marks keep filling up the page

angled lines of desperation stretch across

margin to margin like evening shadows

reach across the endless winter

what of that pink railway carriage

what of those blue cushions

we’d have never reached out

had we but known

Categories
montreal poetic school

Things I’ll Miss

montreal at night

City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.

Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.

The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.

Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.

And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,

how I long to miss you.

Categories
humor la casa comics libraries poetic school webcomics

Another library limerick and some introspection too

photo of a student

In the grand tradition.

There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.

It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.

On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.

To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey – no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.

We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.

We start with a dream …

Categories
poetic school

Cellar Door

I don’t know who decided that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phrase in the English language, but I have to say that I don’t agree. Not even a little bit. I find it to be a somewhat ugly, clumsy phrase, with little lyrical quality and, visually, with too much slant to the right. I think about these sorts of things too much, I agree.

Every once in a while, I write a combination of words with which I become quite pleased, and, as I glance about the room, I silently preen for a few moments before I move on with my writing. No one ever notices, sure, but little literaku moments such as these sometimes make my whole day worthwhile.

Just now in an essay on censorship in Ancien Regime France, I wrote: curtailing scurrilous printing. You can leave the printing out, it’s the combination of curtailing and scurrilous that I quite like, and that will make today worthwhile.

Assuming I finish this paper soon.

Categories
personal poetic

Your Head Asplode

faded diver

Mad-cap dash rap
my brain is a thrummin’
haven’t got the chance
all day to give a crap
to this song I’m strummin’

Mixed up and overmixed
battered up, not buttered
overpopped and underseasoned
my arguments become unreasoned
as I become unspun

Flown over, flown by
days pass by and by
I float awry and wonder

why

why

why

Clueless and getting less
clued in, my mind spins
just three more days now
just three more days now
just three more days now

Second year’s the charm
almost done
overcooked
asploded.

ahniwa ferrari – 13 february 2008

Categories
poetic

More than this I cannot say

leaves and a cross

Though trundled I throughout the day
more than this I cannot say

And bustled I throughout my tasks
more than this I cannot ask

For merrily we work and play
more than this we cannot say

and merrily we breath our last
more than this we cannot ask.

ahniwa ferrari — 11 february 2008

Categories
personal poetic school

Two Weeks

daisiesonawall

two weeks

it’s like a whisper
it’s less than
it may never come
it certainly can’t arrive soon enough

two weeks

and this world forgotten
this world of the grind
of hybrid solutions to indelible problems
of trying to bury myself between the lines

two weeks

for two weeks i will
rise above this endlessness
i will learn again
to speak without whispering

ahniwa ferrari — 05 february 2008

Categories
poetic school

Sigh-ku

Endless winter days;
five reference assignments:
too much for too little.

Categories
love personal poetic

All The Things We Forget To Say

All the things we forget to say
fall between the cushions
hide nestled in lint and loose change
grow warm and complacent and dusty
and we never think to clean them off and speak them.

All the things we forget to say
fall somewhere within the distance
between here and there
shimmy loose in the abstraction of cords and wires
and we never think to search them out and speak them.

All the things we forget to say
subside quietly into the sea
sink gracefully through the currents
come to rest at the bottom of oceans
where we dive for them and find
all the things we thought to say
and all the things worth saying.

04 Jan 2008 — Ahniwa Ferrari

Categories
internet love poetic

A Softer Snippet

Joey Comeau, who writes A Softer World and who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia (a place I hear good things about constantly), also has a blog, which is called Overqualified, and which is beautiful and funny and often meaningful. He has also just released a new book of short stories called It’s too late to say I’m sorry.

Here’s a snippet from his most recent OQ entry:

Late at night, drunk, our language changes. Our adjectives shift, becoming stronger, more romantic. Our verbs become more clear, more specific, occasionally more desperate. They change even when we’re talking of simple things, like eating an apple if you will excuse my example. In the day we simply eat an apple, but late at night, while my wife sleeps, I tell another woman how I am piercing the apple with my teeth. Then I am cutting flesh from it and laying those pieces on my tongue. I am imagining that its flavors are hers.

Categories
personal poetic

DYDRMR

Once laid out on that distant shoreline
sand wiggled between toes.

One unending summer,
I’ll dream you a name for every cloud that passes.

Categories
love personal poetic

Disparation

As if the things that bothered us
really mattered anyhow.

We were clenched so tight,
knuckles white,
someone had snuck through in the night and
monkey-wrenched our stomachs.

Why’d the blue skies turn gray, anyway?

It’s easy to play like
there’s no such place as far away,
like distance can drop
like a pin when you call.

Even though the voices penetrate
sometimes the closeness gets lost in the signal.

But it’s not the far away that matters,
but the mutters in our memories,
the murk of missing you that
blends your face into the trees of Mont-Royal.

And there was freezing rain, too.

I came back, expectations akimbo and
high as a kite flown over at least
eight states and two provinces but
not dinged up in the least.

Expectations perform tricks in the slightest breeze.

Fuck freezing rain, anyway.

It nearly took until July before
a heat wave melted those thin ice blankets,
those preconcexpectations that,
like veils,
obfuscate everything.

As if the things that mattered
ever really bothered us anyhow.

At least

I can say that now.

06 July 2007 –Ahniwa Ferrari

Categories
libraries poetic tech

re: Open Access and the Progress of Science

I recently wrote a few pages about Open Access myself, for a take-home test in my Collection Development course.  Since I was writing at about five in the morning, it’s hard to remember if what I said made any sense (I tend not to look back over my assignments once I’ve handed them in).  I do remember that my tone was very much pro-OA, and that my title was “Open Access (or Close the Door)”.  If I did make sense, then I hope that my paper resembled somewhat the one recently written by Alma Swan for American Scientist Online.

Swan argues against the current way we disseminate research:

“But no one would say, “Hey, why don’t we only let some researchers see this stuff and see how science gets on?” Yet that is precisely where we are today, in a system where gateways limit access to research results, and as a consequence only a small fraction of the world’s research libraries subscribe to some journals. The gentleman’s club survives, if only as metaphor.”

Swan goes on to cite multiple ways in which an open access publishing model would improve scientific research.  I’m sure it makes a bit more sense than my paper did, but the sentiment is very much the same.

Open access, or close the door.

Read the article:
American Scientist Online – Open Access and the Progress of Science

Categories
personal poetic webcomics

A Paragon of Productivity

Due to my complete and utter lack of drawing skill (except for when I was in Paris and became, inexplicably, endowed with the spirit of Henri Rousseau), I’m always looking for some way to create a webcomic that doesn’t involve my creating images. Okay, so this is no great artistic ideal, but I’m quite taken with the medium, and want to find some way in which I can contribute. I thought about becoming a critic, but I found that that was already something that Websnark was doing incredibly well and that Fleen was doing incredibly in bulk. Disappointing.

Anyway. Yesterday I came up with an idea for a webcomic that I could create that would match three of my (currently) major interests. Libraries, World of Warcraft, and … webcomics. Okay, so maybe the third one is redundant. Drawing or no, creating a webcomic requires a large committment of both time and energy, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up that such a thing will actually be created. I was just excited about the idea. Who knows, maybe I’ll become endowed with the spirit of Alexandre Dumas and become a paragon of productivity.

As if.

Note: Alexandre Dumas’ collected works fill 277 volumes, and he claims to have written 1,200 volumes, though that was in the day of multi-volume novels. (from Trivia Library)

Categories
cinema poetic

Paul Giamatti and Walt Whitman

I've had a great deal of respect for Paul Giamatti since Sideways, particularly, and thought he did a bang-up job as Screw-On Head.  Today I ran across his reading of Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider", which is a beautiful poem and wonderfully read.  (download from PoetryFoundation.org)

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
 
-Walt Whitman

Categories
book poetic

Beautiful Evidence

Edward Tufte's latest book, Beautiful Evidence, has gotten some mixed reviews, but whether good or bad they've certainly piqued my curiosity.

From 37signals:

“What struck me is how you almost never have to hold something in your head while turning the page…he usually finishes his thought within the two pages you can see…and when you flip, it’s something new…that’s an excellent self-imposed constraint…’whatever i need to say, i’ll do it here.’”

and from an Amazon.com reviewer:

This book is, of course, going to be widely read and highly praised. But I don't think it will it be read enough. It is frustrating to read something like this advocating ethical scholarship and standards for evidence when there are new books that flat out lie about science. And when you can lie about science — that part of human endeavor that Galileo transformed with his forever idea that it was all about evidence — you can lie about anything.

To do your bit to kill truthiness, you could do much worse than following the principles in Beautiful Evidence.

 (via kottke)

Categories
humor libraries personal poetic

A library limerick

There once was a librarian,
who referenced as well as one can.
While helping a student,
he said it would have been prudent,
if you'd shown up with some sort of plan.

(unfortunately based on numerous true stories)