The ten living American poets that I admire—at the moment—the most:
Terrance Hayes
Robert Hass
Diane Suess
Yusef Komunyakaa
Ocean Vuong
Carl Phillips
Hanif Abdurraqib
Mai Der Vang
Ilya Kaminsky
Jihyun Yun
“Ellington travels so much in his music, everyone bumps into him.” —Barbara Guest, “Sassafras”
In 41 States, Richest 1 Percent Pay Lowest Tax Rate of Any Group
From an article in Truthout by Sharon Zhang:
The wealthiest Americans are reaping the most benefits from regressive tax codes. In 41 states, the report found, the top 1 percent richest households pay a lower proportion of their incomes than the rest of the population, despite having the most ability to part with their incomes; and in all but four states, the top 1 percent are taxed less than the middle 60 percent, a group often categorized as the “middle class” by economists.
In 34 states, meanwhile, the families with the lowest incomes not only pay more of their incomes in taxes than the richest households, they also pay the highest tax rate of anyone else in the state.
…In Florida, which ranked the worst on ITEP’s inequality index, the top 1 percent pay only 2.7 percent of their incomes on taxes on average, while the lowest 20 percent pay 13.2 percent — nearly five times more.
https://truthout.org/articles/in-41-states-richest-1-percent-pay-lowest-tax-rate-of-any-group/
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” -Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey in Utah, the year before his death. Photo by Matt Klett.
Every Day We Get More Illegal
by Juan Felipe Herrera
Yet the peach tree
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert
burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey
laws pass laws with scientific walls
detention cells husband
with the son
the wife &
the daughter who
married a citizen
they stay behind broken slashed
un-powdered in the apartment to
deal out the day
& the puzzles
another law then another
Mexican
Indian
spirit exile
migration sky
the grass is mowed then blown
by a machine sidewalks are empty
clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
peers
down — from
an abandoned wooden dome
an empty field
it is all in-between the light
every day this changes a little
yesterday homeless &
w/o papers Alberto
left for Denver a Greyhound bus he said
where they don’t check you
walking working
under the silver darkness
walking working
with our mind
our life
Getting over the worst sickness I have had in years. Today I feel I finally started what I had been hoping to do throughout this winter break: write as much as possible.
"I thought I was recording the dreams I was having; I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them." - Georges Perec, Le Boutique Obscura
“I could be undone every single day by
paradox or what they call in the countryside
blackthorn winter….”
-Eavan Boland, “Midnight Flowers”
“The things that Death will buy
Are Room -
Escape from Circumstances -
And a Name - “
—Emily Dickinson, 644
Palestine Exception: U.S. Colleges Suppress Free Speech, Academic Freedom for Students & Professors
From Democracy Now:
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/27/campus_palestine_exception?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=f2d6e63c40-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-f2d6e63c40-193138580
It fascinates me that whenever I have a break from work—or, now, from school—I have the feeling that I am remembering parts of myself I had forgotten…writing more, reading more, thinking more, creating more, walking more, giving more time to my health, and reengaging in habits that I have not recently had time for.
The Uses and Abuses of Language in Israel’s War on Palestinians
by ISABELLA HAMMAD and SAHAR HUNEIDI:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/language-israel-gaza-palestine/
From Judith Halberstam’s “An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”:
Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known. Gothic, within my analysis, may be loosely defined as the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire within the reader. The production of fear in a literary text (as opposed to a cinematic text) emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning. Gothic, in a way, refers to an ornamental excess (think of Gothic architecture—gargoyles and crazy loops and spirals), a rhetorical extravagance that produces, quite simply, too much. Within Gothic novels, I argue, multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that meaning itself runs riot. Gothic novels produce a symbol for this interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster. The monster always becomes a primary focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number of meanings.
From Louise Glück’s Paris Review interview:
Most of my books are dedicated to my friends. My friends are the center of my life. They are crucial. I change my life to be sure that I see them. They’re all quite different people. I would be impoverished without them. Recently, I bought a small house in Vermont, where my oldest friends still are. My dearest friend now lives two minutes away. For a very long time, I lived in Cambridge and showed her everything I wrote though she lived elsewhere, but now another form of the friendship has been resumed, and it seems that it was waiting to be resumed at any time when it could be. My friendships with people in different cities seem to be like that. There can be a distance in time and also a geographical distance, but when I see them again, it’s as though no time has passed. I mean, much time has passed, many things have changed, but you resume the conversation about what’s going on in the same way as before. And that is the most extraordinary ongoing fact of my life.
The scientific name for the phenomenon of air resonance in an empty cavity such as air blown across an empty bottle is the “Helmholtz resonance”. It was named after Hermann Von Helmholtz, who in the 1860’s developed a device, the Helmholtz resonator, that employed this phenomenon to measure musical pitch.
A model of a Helmholtz resonator
Image by Frederick Mitchell Jr.
I love living in a place with hummingbirds. I am always happy to see one. During a walk a couple summers ago, I saw eight different hummingbirds on the same day. They are extraordinary creatures. They weigh less than a nickel, can fly backwards, can migrate for hundreds of miles alone (the Rufous Hummingbird migrates 4,000 miles every year, between Alaska and Mexico) , they lay eggs the size of a coffee bean, make nests with things like spider silk so the nests can expand as their young grow, can beat their wings 50 times per second, feed on nectar or sugar water every 15 minutes, and can put themselves into a state of torpor (during which their metabolism slows by 95%) if they do not find the food they need or want to conserve energy before migrating.
One more final and one more exam to go and I will be finished with my first semester of college. It’s been difficult and exciting.
It’s wonderful that there are two breaks built into the school year. I want to use the next few weeks to read and write as I have not been able to do recently, as well as get back into certain habits, including posting here more often.
“Letter From Berlin”, an article from The Boston Review on the repression of political dissent in Germany regarding the Gaza occupation:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/letter-from-berlin/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=2df9485590-newsletter_12_07_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-2df9485590-41224870&mc_cid=2df9485590&mc_eid=2cfd0a714d