Styling in the Food Court

What is That Dark Shadow Looming Over Me?

Love Letter in Leaf Litter

Exalting the Useless and Derelict

On a recent trip to Takamatsu to renew my visa, I came across this old map in the window of a redecorating store:

What does it depict? A section of the town I presume, but I was more attracted by the shapes and the orientations of the writing, radiating outward from the center, than trying to decipher its historical significance.

Its artistic sensibility made me think of an old This American Life episode I had heard about mapping; how "every map is the world seen through a different lens."

In that show, Ira Glass interviews a geographer named Denis Wood who maps unconventional aspects of ordinary neighborhoods, like pumpkins on porches or "patterns of leaf light on the neighborhood."  He wants his maps, bundled together as an atlas, to be seen as a "collection of patterns of light and sound and smell and taste and communication with others."

Ira, ever the realist, points out that maps by and large are functional tools. They have a purpose. They are a way to describe the world. They get us from point A to point B.

Wood, not to be deterred, says he is on a mad search for a "poetics of cartography," that he exists "in a dream of maps" where "useless knowledge is exalted."

And that's right where I think I stand sometimes — exalting the useless and derelict.

What You Have Is All You Need

Ever wonder how to properly use the ladle that rests so invitingly on the stone basin at Japanese temples?

I have too. Here's how:

First, wash your left hand.
Then, wash your right hand.
Finally, put some water in your left hand and rinse your mouth.

Greeted by Purple Mermaids

Went out to visit one of the local islands on Saturday and were greeted by a couple of smiling mermaids as we got off the ferry.

The sign (above, left) says "Welcome to Ōshima" or, the Big Island. (Ironic as the island is fairly small — can't be more than a square kilometer, I'd say).

Well, all right, one smiling mermaid, then.

In Which I Review an American Renga (Whatever That Is)

What’s the Big Idea?

Crossing State Lines: An American Renga

Edited by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011


The big idea was for a poem to be started on the East Coast in the fall and sent poet by poet, state by state, around the country, criss-crossing all fifty states, before arriving at its final destination in California on Robert Hass’s electronic doorstep sometime in the spring. Along the way, each poet who received the slowly accreting mass of words would look at the previous entry or entries and write a ten-line poem in response, or in defiance, or in whatever manner they could channel their inner Issa to carry them to whatever lonely peninsula or pine barren they were inclined to go. They would have two days to complete their lines before sending the whole thing on to the next writer.

Continue reading at Open Letters Monthly....