(Poem #66 on new numbering scheme)
The biggest holiday of the year in Korea is called Chusok. This year it's a bit early. "Korean Thanksgiving" celebrates harvests and ancestors, so people travel home.
(Poem #66 on new numbering scheme)
The biggest holiday of the year in Korea is called Chusok. This year it's a bit early. "Korean Thanksgiving" celebrates harvests and ancestors, so people travel home.
(Poem #65 on new numbering scheme)
No lo sé. De veras, no sé porque no sé, tampoco. Sin embargo, puedo imaginar razones porque no sé. Por ejemplo: penas epistemológicas. I don't know. Truthfully I don't know why I don't know, either. Nevertheless, I can imagine some reasons why I don't know. For example: epistemological troubles.
– a reverse nonnet, in Spanish, with a properly-formed translation into English
(Poem #64 on new numbering scheme)
Recently I read the tide's turning among linguists, who now reject Chomskyan orthodoxy. That linguist's ideas about how words work always seemed wrong. I think words' syntax drifts.
(Poem #63 on new numbering scheme)
I had let my nonnet-writing slide during the last several days, but I wrote this here nonnet during a break at work, just now, to have one which I could post on my blog. It's not good.
(Poem #62 on new numbering scheme)
I had never intended to age. Yet each year slyly captures me. It tends to be annoying. Nevertheless, I cope. The main thing: just breathe. If you do that, you can live till next year.
(Poem #61 on new numbering scheme)
North of the Ten Freeway at Rosemead, a place redolent of regrets, honeysuckle and asphalt, I received some treatments which electrified the aches and pains which haunted my lost mind.
(Poem #60 on new numbering scheme)
I was gazing up at the green trees, meandering to work one day, and that Lou Reed song came on. "What makes a perfect day?" I wondered and thought: "Not.much more than quite simply saying so."
(Poem #59 on new numbering scheme)
In my most advanced Tuesday cohort there is a student named David. I think he's full of anger. When he gets a low score his face scrunches up, he shouts at me, he hits desks, he cries, "No."
I made this nonnet after reading the article I mentioned in my previous blog post.
(Poem #58 on new numbering scheme)
A new rain of unfortunate ants has arrived, my fellow workers! Let's welcome them to our dark yet thriving, cold abode! Let's show them the walls! Let's move this dirt! Let's begin to eat(,) ants!
(Poem #57 on new numbering scheme)
Grasping the atmosphere like despair, the humidity guards the dusk. The equinox approaches. A hazy twilight hangs. My expectation helps me walk home, awaiting longer nights.
(Poem #56 on new numbering scheme)
While the sun was glaring, a cloud drifted meditatively across a hazy sky, but the cloud failed to commit to any kind of rainmaking. It felt no inclination for mud.
(Poem #55 on new numbering scheme)
I was walking to the hospital the other day and wondering how to make some poetry on a late summer day. I heard some crickets. My conclusion: like those bugs, I can speak.
(Poem #54 on new numbering scheme)
Time is not exactly a progression of simple events. Rather, it loops and whirls, perhaps like a falling leaf caught up in a vortex of wind skittering across our grassy minds.
(Poem #53 on new numbering scheme)
Korean ghosts are thick on the ground: everyone's ancestors cluster round each monument or tree. There are some migrants, too: shades that have followed a sorry soul's displacements: Michelle's ghost.
(Poem #52 on new numbering scheme)
Otorhinolaryngologists' polysyllabifications obfuscatorially institutionalize impenetrable medicalized colloquies. Doctors talk.
(Poem #51 on new numbering scheme)
I want to discuss these rice-eating rules, since, for me, rice is a problem. Pieces get lost in my mouth, dodging my broken tongue. Sometimes I will choke. Porridge can work. Starvation also works.
– This nonnet is a “response” to Jeong Ho-seung’s poem that I posted earlier today.
(Poem #50 on new numbering scheme)
Automobiles are a kind of theme that were roaring through my childhood. My father grew up with cars. My youngest memories thrum with the noises emerging from my father's Model A.
(Poem #49 on new numbering scheme)
Last night we got a refreshing rain. so my coworker turned to me and wanted to know what kind of idiom we use to express that breath of cool pleasure in English. "I don't know."
(Poem #48 on new numbering scheme)
Some kids have a lot to say in class. Other students stare wordlessly. I want them to feel their worth, understand our topics, and become engaged. Mostly I fail. It is hard. They just sit.
(Poem #47 on new numbering scheme)
Fall can't come all at once. Fall must sneak in, catch us unawares with a yellow leaf here and a northerly breeze there. I smelled autumn's covert rustlings today: percepts tasting of woodsmoke.
(Poem #46 on new numbering scheme)
That ineffable cobalt color was painting the glowering clouds. Conspiratorially, the air whispered its plans for inundation. Then I felt it on my cheek: one cool drop.
(Poem #45 on new numbering scheme)
Joy is not easily correlated with other events. Instead, it arises, as if spontaneously, immanent to the warp and woof of quotidian experience.
(Poem #44 on new numbering scheme)
Some days feel like things are going well. Some days start well but end badly. Some days I dread but end great. Some days are smooth like glass. Some days are bumpy. Some days give joy. Some days don't. Some days suck.
(Poem #43 on new numbering scheme)
Maybe I am becoming a plant. Every Sunday I cut my hair. In the weird fluorescent light, today, in the bathroom, I looked at the floor. Surprisingly, the clippings looked like moss.
(Poem #42 on new numbering scheme)
Small ripples propagate across the brown, cream-colored surface of my morning's coffee, put there by the blowing wind exhaled by my electric fan which perches in my window, bird-like.
(Poem #41 on new numbering scheme)
Perhaps the ground has dried out too much. The last rain was a while ago. So the worm started a trip across the vast sidewalk, its goal uncertain. The sun's so hot. It wriggles; going east.
(Poem #40 on new numbering scheme)
Some say the world is a living thing; Or that it's a clockwork machine. But I don't see it that way. Instead, recursively, the world gives a proof of the theorem that says that we are here.
(Poem #39 on new numbering scheme)
Ví que amaneció nublado pero ya al mediodía se había convertido en día de calor. Una cigarra allá arriba me cantó, "Hola, pues."
– un noneto
[Update: My friend Bob suggested I translate this into English, but retaining the nonnet form. I took the challenge:]
I saw that the morning dawned cloudy but by the middle of the day the weather had changed so it had become a hot day. Then a cicada somewhere up there sang to me "Hello, there."
(Poem #38 on new numbering scheme)
Sometimes at day's end I'm exhausted. I finish work and I walk home. I feel like my mind is dust. I can't even daydream. I find some music. I move one foot... the other, heavy foot.
(Poem #37 on new numbering scheme)
Looking out the window of the train, the stretch of elevated track lends a feeling of flying, as if in slow motion, across cityscapes which seem almost infinite... full of souls.
(Poem #36 on new numbering scheme)
I have been staying on this planet. The planet is sometimes called Earth. I just have a work visa. So, if I stop working I will have to leave. But departures are sometimes very sad.
(Poem #35 on new numbering scheme)
Most people see maps as simply tools, or at best, perhaps metaphors. What if a map is not real? What is it a map of? Imagination's distant spaces manifest and made art.
(Poem #34 on new numbering scheme)
Choosing what to eat is always hard. Lately, sometimes I make oatmeal. I chop up half an apple. I add some cinnamon. After I cook it, it's difficult. I need to try to eat.