Harmony
The world is out of balance. How many times has this been said? The machines of profit do not compute extraneous loss. They are out of balance with the natural world.
Love and I
Today, my dear Mercurius friends, I want to share some poems by Fanny Howe, an American poet who turned 80 this October 15, 2020.
Beauty
Perhaps reaching a definition of beauty is simply an exercise in skilful omission, in suggesting absences, in loss.
Happy New Year Mr. President. Episode 1: The Genesis Symposium
Do not approach these twelve minutes in anticipation of a plot, use them rather as a chance to contemplate all who have been born and died, or will be born and will die.
What is injustice?
Suffering is everywhere. Much is self-created. However, much is also structural, and derives from nature’s cruel hierarchies or from the abuse endemic in human systems. This latter source of suffering is known as injustice.
Sea to spawn
This one-minute film, as well as celebrating eels, explores the ways in which visual poems can be handled and archived. The concrete poem at the centre of the film is labyrinthine and interlacing, and its text ‘slides’ into the form of an eel to interrupt what would be an otherwise a linear poem.
Peace and Emptiness
In September, the seasons change. The mountains brim with wild fruit and mushrooms. The year begins to point towards an end. The shallow dance above the void seeks a space unpolluted by time, by sorrow, by joy. Despite our heartbreak and our acts of foolishness, somehow a perfect source remains intact.
Among the incurables (and other poems)
Mercurius explores the wonderful worlds of Scott Harney, Kythe Heller, Oksana Sabuzhko, and Peter Balakian. Essential reading for our times.
What is movement?
Creation’s favourite: the birds that serenade the fleeing stars, the Pamplemousse dawn, draped in sheets of pink and red across the sky…
The Good Life in a crisis-ridden age
All forms of society-building sprawl out of some kind of positive, moral principle. I will try to illustrate this point using four popular models as examples: the American Dream, the Close-knit Religious Community, the Buddhist Monastery and the Mediterranean Lifestyle.
Home
Although travel is exciting, home comforts are hard to beat. My daily morning ritual involves making coffee, feeding the starving cat, opening the balcony doors, sitting down to read or write a poem. The repetition of these tiny acts have brought a sense of calm and purpose to my life.
Our Oceanic Life
The highest currency of change is song. The ocean, for all her perils and charms, breathes her music into us. Her manifold realities are fraught with songful dreams and dangers.
Say morning, and a bird trills on a doorstep outside a kitchen
Today we are going to meet a great poet, Shara McCallum. I first met her at the 2017 Miami Book Fair. She had recently published her book: Madwoman.
The Ego versus Death
It’s been there since birth, that little voice inside me, singing, or shouting, or wailing, me first, me first, me first. The rudimentary mantra of existence.
Mercuries #5 - The Animal Drums
The first major poetry-film of the 21st century - Gareth Evans. The Animal Drums…
The Two Theatres of Life
Human life is composed and regulated by a seemingly infinite series of stages, of spectacles that breathe meaning into our invented worlds.
The mystery of the seven-pointed star
The meaning of this personal story lies in the excavated depths, where frequencies invent whole worlds then lie submerged within them. The end of the transformational road is the ineffable image of the seven-pointed star, a symbol that pertains neither to me nor anyone.
Blindness is the root of all disaster
If Paris had seen the fall of Troy in the theft of Helen, he might have left her well alone. Regret is an echo of former blindness murmuring in the present. Remorse is self-awareness pointing out a role you might have played in disaster.
Contemporary American poetry: A selection
Dear Mercurius friends, today I invite you on a journey through the different voices of contemporary American poetry, all of them published online via the music platform Spotify.
Change: Wisdom realising emptiness
What bliss and dread to know that nothing comes to anything in the finale of our days: we breathe and breathe again and then, before the look has scarcely touched the hour, we fade into another dream, a different fragment of a different star.
The never-ending quest…
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