My Scrapbook

A memoir is a representation of the author's encounter with memory. It is a compromise with the demands of narrative and that medium we call a book. It is less a record of the past than the record of a sustained questioning, reflective authorial inquiry.

—Richard Hoffman, “Backtalk and Backlash: The Aims, Impact, and Value of Memoir,” in Remembering The Alchemists

“A self must learn. The body is. The body knows. A self learned to act as if it is real, and learned to ignore what the body knows. The body transcends the self and not, as religions have it, the other way around; even when they posit a stand-in for the self called the soul, the idea is that a personal transcendence is possible and ought to be sought after. Begin with that orientation to the divine, and one can talk all one wants about charity, generosity, brotherhood—it's every man for himself. Even before there were religions there was religious war.”

—Richard Hoffman, “Like Never Before,” in Remembering The Alchemist

Interesting to compare these two views, written four hundred years apart or so:

All men and women are to each other
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl;
and when this life we share wounds one of us,
all share the hurt as if it were our own.
You, who will not feel another’s pain,
no longer deserve to be called human.

–Saadi of Shiraz (my translation)

§§§

All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume;
when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke,
but translated into a better language;
and every Chapter must be so translated.

–John Donne, Devotions

Why is it that the final poem of the book you're working on, the one that ties the entire volume together, always proves to be the most difficult to revise?

A gull in Oban, August 2024.

Lines That Didn't Make The Cut

Across the span, as counterpoint, a flock
of pigeons lifted into flight. “We get,”
he said, “a bullet each. If you do not die,
you do not die.” Nothing I regret
hurts more than this: I watched the cloudless sky
refuse to darken; I did not watch their guns
refuse to kill, or the rising of all those suns.

Lines That Didn't Make The Cut

Desire feeds on what it finds, blurring
the borders of our narrative. The ones
who want to hide our past from us
have woven through that book you're here to translate
a warning: “Precautions are superfluous.
They will be back. It is already late.”

Dog Yoga

Archie, two moods

We must not fear repetition in poetry,
because sweet speech is pleasant in the repetition.

—Nasir Khusraw, translated by Alice C. Hunsberger

"It is [an] irony of oppression that the solution chosen to eliminate an enemy often guarantees that enemy's enduring fame. [N]o one knows the names of [Nasir Khusraw's] oppressors, but his poems...speak across centuries...to anyone who has [known] war, oppression or terror."

—Alice Hunberger, Nasir Khusraw: The Ruby of Badakhshan