Month: juli 2018
When I shine my walking boots
When I shine my walking boots everything is underway I remember the dusty sand trail that I didn't walk for long, but they were so present, like the big rocks lining the path leading to the limestone hill One proved enough, a rock the size of a tree trunk, to sit me down. My boots ...
Strand en palmbomen
Deze hete julimaand trakteerden we onszelf op een reisje naar Jeju, het vakantiepreteiland ten zuiden van het Koreaanse schiereiland, om ons op een maatschappelijk geaccepteerde wijze te ontspannen. We arriveerden met de veerboot in de kleine haven aan de noordzijde van het vulkanische paradijs. Op deze plek verwacht men een beschrijving van onze activiteiten. De ...
Online Poem Generator
As someone who loves the belief that poetry is a form of communication, I am inclined to see its authenticity threatened by the emergence of automated poem generators. I am aware that strong AI will be among us within a few decades from now, if we believe the predictions of researchers in the field, but ...
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Message in a Bottle
I want to say love before death words but
they only dig at night they dig in the clouds
a Ceylon pigeon shat on the Spanish stairs
(but they vacuum the moon)
I mean the message never arrives
Reading: A Found Photo by Jacques Réda
Jacques Réda (b.1929) is a French poet and lover of jazz. His poetry often conveys small and innocent scenes. I read a poem about an old photo, wonderfully translated by Jenny Feldman: A Found Photo One day the three of us out in this boat. The day black and white but clearly summer For in ...
Meditation on Thinking
We sit and breathe calmly. We observe that we are thinking and in a first, gentle, move, admit that it is a concept that will always evade our definition. We just think. The ability to distinguish it from not-thinking requires a precise definition, hence in other words we are always-already caught in the realm of ...
Reading: In Jerusalem by Mahmoud Darwish
Today I read a poem by Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008) in a translation by Fady Joudah. Darwish was born in Galilee, in a village that doesn't exist anymore. He lived in exile in Beirut and Paris and published a lot of books. I know that he was considered a 'resistance poet' and served on an executive committee of the ...