Better a poem be nearly wrong than nearly right.

The Arts of Strangers

You cut your own hair,
you wring your own shirt,
you do your own favours.

“It really is a nation”

“There comes a time in the history of a nation when its artists and intellectuals no longer feel a need to assert at all times that it really is a nation, with a culture of its own.”

— From “Brazilian Poetry Today”, by Paulo Henriques Britto, in the Los Angeles Review of Books

And they all lived

Happily
iffer
after.

When the horizon is a tightrope

Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni

Balance is a process, not a state. It means holding steady a centre of gravity: a negotiation among mass and momentum and energy. On this depends stability and mobility. The tightrope walker keeps moving, or else she falls, and her successful journey is an ongoing compromise between her own mass, tension in the wire, and universal gravity.

— From “A fine balance”, in the November 2013 Caribbean Review of Books

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On the Rio Paracauary, Ilha do Marajó; 26 August, 2013

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— What is wrong with a poem?
— All the right things.

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Overheard

At the cash register in a Manhattan bookshop:

Customer: I give Autobiography of Red to everyone I have a secret crush on.

Clerk: Does it work?

Customer: Not yet.

.
It took longer to read about those months than to live them.
.