Journal, Day Five February 9, 2007: POETRY JOURNAL, DAY FIVE: ANIMAL PORTRAITS Getting ready to write an essay on the paintings of Siddharth Parasnis, I’m struggling to articulate the vivacity I admire in his work. How fasten it to words? He’s certainly learned from Diebenkorn: there’s a similar love of the architectural line, a similar brightness in the palette, and an [...] by Peter Campion

Journal, Day Four February 8, 2007: POETRY JOURNAL, DAY FOUR: “THE TROUTS NOSE” From the newly published Notebooks of Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) comes this diss on Yeats: WBY says… the artist has a choice of seven poses. One of them he must assume. Don’t believe it children. There is such a thing [...] by Peter Campion

Journal, Day Three February 7, 2007: POETRY JOURNAL, DAY THREE: “IT’S ALWAYS THE POETS WHO FALL IN THE RIVER” At the Writers Festival in South Korea we visit a Confucian monastery. It’s a five hours train ride, south from Seoul. Evening has settled by the time we get there and a tent has been set up with tables for dinner. Soju circles around in green bottles and shot [...] by Peter Campion

Journal, Day Two February 6, 2007: POETRY JOURNAL, DAY TWO: ANTINOMIES Last night in a dream: the image of a painting by my friend, Kim Frohsin. It was the one I fell in love with in December, when, preparing to write an essay for her art book, I visited Kim’s San Francisco studio. The picture shows a nude model with her back turned to the viewer and her calves resting on a [...] by Peter Campion

Journal, Day One February 5, 2007: POETRY JOURNAL, DAY ONE: THE LOST GOOGAPLITZ Elmo and Zoe are wearing capes. Elmo has what looks like a mesh fruit container tied to his head, and Zoe wears a metal colander on hers. The little red and orange monsters swivel and pop in excitement. The scene is Sesame Street, but these two are pretending to be “explorer friends” arriving in [...] by Peter Campion

Journal, Day Five February 2, 2007: Find true American eloquence, i.e., anti-eloquence, our vernacular, on the streets and in the fields. Item: A Mexican migrant laborer picking lettuce in Texas, when asked if he owned any land: “I don’t even own the dirt under my fingernails.” Item: Next to me at a San Francisco bus stop, a broken-down guy wearing headphones: “Hey, [...] by W.S. Di Piero

Journal, Day Four February 1, 2007: Taos, Christmas Eve, 2005. Ferociously beautiful. A half-mile from the Pueblo you see black smoke running up the nighttime sky, bright flecks chipping the firmament, stars so wild and primeval that they seem the gods the Greeks and other tribes believed them to be. Inside the Pueblo walls, pinyõn pine bonfires blaze, sparks fly into children’s [...] by W.S. Di Piero