“The Room”, Allen Grossman

I like this idea of making quiet.

“Tell Me Something Good”, Ocean Vuong

How you can love the world until there’s nothing left to love but yourself. I recently finished both of his poetry collections.

I was watching a baby bumblebee today, even now he’s already heavy: when he lands on a flower he falls with it in a parabola.

On trauma: every person has some inherent objective function that they optimize. Trauma from parents seems to be the adding of a new function onto it, such that the resulting sum matches the parent’s function more closely, basically forcing the child’s optimization to look the way the parent wants it by changing the function. This is usually done by introducing negative, since the objective function needs only have a certain relative shape, not absolute values. And it’s much harder to shape the function by adding guilt. So instead we add guilt or other mechanisms to pull the curve down and make less desirable actions desirable by being the lesser of evils. We are all Pavlovian dogs.

I read somewhere that grief is just love with no place to go. Yes, I have had specific griefs, drawn out too. Lose a girl, a friend, your faith in the world, and so on. But this. This is a general grief of sorts. Not one person I want to love and cannot, nay, a whole world of people. I simply want to love at all, and know I can, but somehow, am here and am not.

Here are a few nice poems Jenny pointed me to when we met today. I have some revising of my own poems to do as well, I’d like to be better about editing and existing in that state, and I want to start submitting some poems to be published too. The theme of these poems is generally sectioning, as that’s something I’m trying to learn to play with.

“Dogfish”, Mary Oliver

“Ghosts”, Mary Oliver

“I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open”, Yehuda Amichai

I really like this poem, particularly the camera bit.