Month: juli 2018

Reading: The Shirt by Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940) is one of America's greatest poetry critics. He was elected Poet Laurate of the US in 1997. Today I read a social poem about sweatshops, written long before the incident in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013. The Shirt The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along ...
Review: Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall has been a very exciting read for me, and many readers on Goodreads agree (there are 1400 reviews available). It is the best book on geopolitics that I have read so far and it has helped me consolidate what I already knew and taught me a lot of new things as well. ...
Ideologie
Op de terugweg van een vermakelijk onderonsje met mijn Koreaanse zwager in een historische wijk van Seoul waar het nu wemelt van delicatessen en bijoux, stapte ik in volle overtuiging in de metrotrein in de verkeerde richting. Uw kniereflex is bekend: dat overkomt iedereen wel eens. Maar ik bleef zitten en verbaasde me er station ...
Sterven
Ik herinner me een oude man die over sterven begon het is een vreselijk iets, zei hij, ik heb er een hekel aan hij blijft me het antwoord schuldig hoe hij dat weten kon want hij heeft het uiteindelijk maar een keer gedaan.
Reading: Mourning and Other Activities by Raza Ali Hasan
Raza Ali Hasan (b. ?) is a Pakistani-American poet who doesn't care much about activism. He was born in Bangladesh and raised in Islamabad and moved to tue United States in 1991. He wants his poetry to paint a more accurate picture of the world. He teaches in Colorado. I read a verse about mourning ...
Smile encounter
I ride the Seoul subway, line six. A small young woman in a colorful dress gets in and takes a seat. She is not Korean and she wears a scarf. As relative outsider in this monocultural megalopolis, I instinctively feel solidarity with the timid girl, whose face was ridden with acne. I smile at her. ...
When we’re old and done
When we're old and done How will our love feel? Will we be Anxious, afraid we missed out on What we could have done? Afraid of Looking back and feeling like dry sand? Life seems funny and meaningful when the people Around us are younger and we, unwittingly We become authorities on living They say ...
Reading: Theory of Prosody by Philip Levine
Philip Levine (1928-2015) was an American poet. As a boy, he worked in the factories of Detroit and was fascinated by the events of the Spanish civil war. He was among the most important poetic voices of the industrial poor of the twentieth century. I read a seemingly playful piece of his that is not ...